‘The price we pay for the sins of our father’
Nigerians born between 1960 and the 1980s like to make a point. When they decide to do that, they do it in the most malicious and grueling way. If you looked at this behavioural trait very well, you will find that it is not their fault. Instead, their acquiescence with pain and violence is the result of the social and political environment they lived in during their formative years.
From 1966, the year the country ushered itself into civil war, these people were gradually primed to derive satisfaction in seeing others, especially those who they share different positions with, in discomfort. They witnessed massacres against others; sometimes they were the ones carrying out the massacres; and other times they were the victims.
By the time they were easing themselves out of the damage the civil war had done to them, there was an increase in armed robbery in the country. The government reacted to this by making people witness almost the same thing they saw during the civil war — public executions.
There was an upset in the way many people, especially those in Lagos, spend their weekends. The bar beach, for example, where many people go to relax and where white garment people do their celestial things became known as a place to watch live firing squads in action.
Depending on how you look at it, many people visited the Bar Beach in Victoria Island for different reasons: Some did so to watch the execution of criminals because they derived recreational pleasure from it; some go there to remind themselves as to why they must never be part of a robbery (which was what the government wanted initially).
The agenda of the government kicked in even further. People, whose reaction to seeing others killed and punished due to the civil war, were further de-sensitised. It got to the point where they started taking their children, the stubborn ones who were not up to 18-year-old, to witness public execution of armed robbers and kidnappers by the firing squad.
Of course, when you asked older people who did this, they would likely argue that they took that decision to show their children why a life of crime was a bad idea. But what they did not realise was the insane aggressive cues registered in the minds of their wards.
In theory, there are ways to curtail those aggressive cues, like the one many young people witnessed at the Bar Beach and the market where thieves were roast to death. An action like limiting exposure to the media could work — except that in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, access to the media was really low. And in fact, that generation of parents were actors in the acts of violence their children were exposed to — something they too learned from their own parents.
In fact, the first time some people experienced torture in their lives, their parents did it. From actions like smearing children’s private parts with red hot pepper, to scarring their bodies with blades and bundling them up with wire and tucking them under their bed. Many parents from that generation did these things for the most minor offences. Zero conversation involved.
How do you expect people who went through this and who were active participants in these actions to understand young people’s fight against police brutality?
See, those children who saw the civil war; those who witnessed the Bar Beach execution of Babatunde Folorunsho, Lawrence Anini, Ishola Oyenusi; the ones that saw thieves roasted in the market because you wanted to show them what happens to those who steal; they are still alive today, except that that humane fuse in them done burst.
To fight for a better Nigeria that is devoid of oppression and suffering, we need to counteract all the systems that are put in place to maintain the status quo. These systems manifest themselves in numerous ways including but not exclusive to the social attitudes towards those we feel deserve to be the voice of the movement.
Conversations around police brutality are often shaped by the men’s understanding of what constitutes police brutality because their stories so frequently make the rounds on social media. Indeed, when Amnesty International conducted the first reported incidents of violence from SARS officers, many of the subjects spoken to were men and represented the ways in which police brutality pertains to them.
But left out of the conversation were the ways in which gendered police violence is a product of a system intent on oppressing its citizens and a manifestation of everything we are currently working to dissolve.
#EndSARS–and its many iterations do not exclude women’s experiences and have never excluded them because the feminist women who are at the forefront of this movement audaciously articulating their demands do not pose a threat to cisgender male life or the lives of those legitimately protected by the state. And with the movement’s current reliance on collective strength and support, rather than a reliance on an independent voice, women are showing that leadership is not a means to centre anyone’s experience above another but to highlight the many layers and structures that threaten our freedom. That is after all what feminism consistently promotes.
The goal is complete abolition of oppression and many among us will have to kill their ego too. There is no revolution without empowered women and if these protests have shown us anything, it’s that the future is truly female. So let’s #ENDSARS.