Treatment of naked black man disdainful

WHEN George Floyd was murdered by the white police in the US, the world condemned the senseless killing.

The officers implicated in the murder have since been axed from the police and apprehended.

Floyd is not the first victim of a brutal murder by the American police.

The painful part is that the police there kill blacks for petty things or petty crime, with impunity. Floyd’s publicised murder is not going to stop the US police from killing and persecuting blacks. Not at all.

South Africa is one of the countries that condemned the senseless killing of Floyd, and rightly so. The ANC jumped on the bandwagon and conveyed its message of disapproval.

Not long ago, the police in Cape Town evicted blacks who had invaded land and built shacks. The police dragged a naked black man out of his shack to evict him. His name is Bulelani Qholani from Khayelitsha.

The pertinent questions are: couldn’t the police wait until the man was dressed? And why did they see it fit to drag him out of the shack naked?

The answer is simple: they have no respect for a black man.

When you look at the American police act against Floyd, and that of South African police against Qholani, it is the same script but different cast. The South African police also have a long history of treating blacks with indignity. The Qholani case is a typical example.

It is sad that a black person can be treated with such disdain by the police in a democracy and under a black government. That said, the South African government is yet to issue a statement condemning the police act against Qholani. The same applies to the ANC, which is a governing party. Their silence on the matter says a lot: black lives don’t matter.

THABILE MANGE | Kagiso