New York State police officers approached
Eric Garner on the suspicion that he was “selling single
cigarettes from packs without tax stamps.” Already tired of
constant harassment, Garner was unwilling to cooperate
with the officers, who wrestled him to the ground and held
him in a chokehold. “I can’t breathe,” Garner said 11 times
while lying down. At some point he lost consciousness
and was later taken to a hospital, where he was
pronounced dead.

Like Garner, George Floyd couldn’t breathe. With a police
knee pressing his neck to the ground, breathing ceased
some minutes later. Floyd did not resist arrest—indeed he
had already been handcuffed and subdued. Except that he
was still breathing and the white police officer, with one
hand in a pocket and flanked by indulgent colleagues,
needed to put a stop to that—which he did.

While Garner and Floyd were asphyxiated, tens of other
black men in America have been shot to death in a pattern
of police murder that fails to abate. Trayvon Martin, Tamir
Rice, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Aston Sterling, John
Crawford, Walter Scott, Terrence Crutcher, Dontre
Hamilton, and more. The killings are as consistent as the
injustice that follows, and the racial motivation is hardly in
question. Protests come and go, stirring a performance of
justice that yields nothing, until the next happens.
Black humanity is under siege. From the mines of
Marikana to the slave markets in Libya, black bodies are
conceived as threatening, worthless, and disposable. In
America, black people have been terrorized for more than
400 years. Yet, in a post-slavery, post-Jim Crow and post-
Civil rights dispensation, racism has refused to exit the
plantation, as white cops shoot black people (black men in
particular) with reckless abandon.

Black men who did not resist arrest are shot. Those
reaching for their IDs in the glove-box are shot. Those
unarmed who flee in fright are shot in the back.
Consistently, however, these police officers never get to
account for their actions. Instead, they are acquitted by a
questionable justice system that forces grieving black
families to relive the pain and trauma of their slain folk,
foreclosing any hope of healing.
With such wanton degree of state-enabled terror visited on
black lives, African Americans cannot happily return to
Africa: because Africa is an even greater site of
devastation.

In Nigeria, the most populous black nation in the world,
SARS (Special Anti-Robbery Squad) kill young men for
sport. In Lagos, young men are repeatedly flagged down
from cars, motorcycles or tricycles and frisked. Some end
up abducted and taken to ATMs where they are stripped of
every penny in their accounts. Others who prove
uncooperative may end up dead or locked up on trumped-
up charges.

According to an Amnesty International report, there were
1,960 complaints against the Nigerian Police in the first six
months of 2016. Most of the complaints involve torture,
extortion and extra-judicial killings. In America, there is at
least the pretence of prosecution. In Nigeria, the cases
rarely ever make it to court. Perhaps, this is why the
Nigerian police are sometimes referred to as “kill-and-go”.
Unsafe on the African continent, unsafe in the diaspora,
black people find no reprieve and can’t breathe. The hard
truth is simple: there will be no reprieve until African
countries build societies that are as prosperous as those
of the West, so that black people who feel unsafe in the
West can have a saner clime to return to if they so desire.
For now, Africa hasn’t proven any less violent to black
bodies than America does—and that is the tragedy. Indeed
other races dehumanize black Africans, aware that we are
treated worse in our own homes. Then again police
brutality in the West makes our local cops to see police
abuse as normal. It is a cycle that is both vicious and
organically reinforcing.

George Floyd is a message to black people all over the
world: more than ever, the need is urgent to build our
societies and do better than the West. Pre-colonial Africa
had a policing “rooted in the community and devoid of
violence,” said Okechukwu Nwanguma, former national
coordinator at the Network for Police Reforms in Nigeria.
He is right.

Floyd is a metaphor, reminding us that fleeing home for
the safety of America may not always mean safety. Foreign
land can be home, especially with permanent residencies
or acquired citizenship. But if blacks who have lived in
America for over 400 years still have no home, why do
African immigrants think they will find any?

For America, if the case of George Floyd goes to trial, it
wouldn’t just be the killer cops on the stand; it would be
the American justice system too. There is an opportunity
here to make a bold statement that goes beyond justice
for Mr. Floyd. It would be a signal to racist police officers
on the streets of America that the cotton fields are closed
for good, and that they must bolt the door behind them.

Eric

The take away fro this list is that Black Africa nation's should strive to build a prosperous economy such that blacks wouldn't have to run to these white men's countries for succor and those willing to return to their roots will find comfort.

If only the present rulers have the foresight.