Luanda, Monday, June 8th. I see in a group of journalists on a social network a discussion about the death of a young man at the hands of the police.
So far Covid-19, which has imposed a two-month state of emergency on the country and a 15-day calamity, has killed four people. In the same period the “accidents” of the police add up to about ten, I have already lost count.
I’m in the newsroom and I look at the Internet, flooded with images of anti-racism demonstrations everywhere. All over the world. It is a good thing that the Black Lives Matter movement varies for all kinds of racism and was not left by the “accidents” of the U.S. Police that end with the death of people with darker skin. I’m glad you scream. Either you scream, or you deny tomorrow.
It is a good good time that the discussion also follows the trail of discrimination, lack of opportunities, segregation. I’m glad it’s not said that black Americans are only killed by white cops.
It is a good good fact that the barriers to access to health care and school attendance are discussed. To opportunities. The problem of violence is much deeper. And it only gets worse when it’s spiced up by racism. Or he fosters them. But it doesn’t all close to ignorant racism. There’s a story you need to tell to shape a different future. And in history there are bright tones of racism, you can’t deny it.
“Black Lives Matter, yes, but it has to be for all blacks, all the lives of this world”
Here, too, the lives of angolan blacks matter, or should, but there is a lack of a white policeman to whom to point the finger.
Just yesterday it was a woman, mother, in Caluquembe, in the south of the country, also killed by a bullet “accidentally” fired by a policeman.
Maybe that’s why in Angola black lives matter didn’t echo much, artists joined and little else on the internet. The political statements were timid. I wonder if it’s because there’s no racism here, because it’s taboo to talk about it, or if it’s because it’s because of the shame of marching on a distant subject when women and children also fall at the hands of the police here, “accidentally.”
The statues of white supremacy have already fallen here at the time of Independence, but in Africa the statues of misery and underdevelopment of hunger have been left or erected. These interest me to help bring it down. They’re statues of shame. But not to erase them from memory, only to nourish it with new sweets of happiness and brotherhood, with smiling dreams
We still have wars in Africa, as we had in Angola, with all kinds of atrocities, such as those that tell us the history of World War II and that of the Balkans. They had the same skin tone, but invented other racism to justify the carnage. There’s always some racism to spice up the madness.
Black Lives Matter, yes, but it has to be for all blacks, all the lives of this world. In Syria, Africa, Latin America, and also the “Black Lives Americans with blue eyes and blond hair”, which there are also. Let it be for all lives. They all matter. On equal terms. This is what racists don’t understand. There’s only one human race.
*Director of the newspaper O País, in Angola
