LETTER: Black lives in Africa matter too
Loading player...
While millions of people, not only in the US but much further afield, know of George Floyd, barely a handful know the name Collins Khoza. Floyd and Khoza were brutally murdered within a few weeks of each other, both by police action. The startling difference between the two murders was that Floyd was killed by a white policeman and Khoza murdered by black soldiers under the command of black policemen.
Soldiers and policemen attacked Khoza in his own yard during the lockdown after he was accused of drinking alcohol. According to witnesses, the soldiers and police slammed his head against a concrete wall and hit him with the butt of a rifle until he was vomiting and unable to walk. He died a few hours later.
The former mayor of Johannesburg recounted asking a woman living in a shack in the same township recently how she managed without a bathroom. Her reply was that she had trained her body to use the bathroom when at work. That is almost as tragic a story as that of Khoza, given that there are millions of people living without bathrooms in SA — without the basic necessity of a dignified life.
Whose black lives really matter? The answer in SA is not a single black life matters under the ANC government. In the rest of Africa, black lives most definitely don’t matter. Those holier-than-thou leftist white liberals marching down the streets of American cities don’t even know where Africa is — they don’t know the lot of black lives in Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan or Darfur.
Have the Left-leaning liberals tearing down statues of people accused of being complicit in the slave trade many years ago never heard of Mauritania, an African country that still practises slavery? The slave markets of Libya and Mali also continue with their macabre trade in human life.
Where are the liberal Left, white, educated college graduates protesting at the embassies of these African countries? Far too busy with political correctness and lobbying for brands to change names and sports stars to “take the knee”.
Allan Wolman
Tel Aviv
JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an e-mail with your comments. Letters of more than 300 words will be edited for length. Send your letter by e-mail to letters@businesslive.co.za. (mailto://letters@businesslive.co.za) Anonymous correspondence will not be published. Writers should include a daytime telephone number.
Soldiers and policemen attacked Khoza in his own yard during the lockdown after he was accused of drinking alcohol. According to witnesses, the soldiers and police slammed his head against a concrete wall and hit him with the butt of a rifle until he was vomiting and unable to walk. He died a few hours later.
The former mayor of Johannesburg recounted asking a woman living in a shack in the same township recently how she managed without a bathroom. Her reply was that she had trained her body to use the bathroom when at work. That is almost as tragic a story as that of Khoza, given that there are millions of people living without bathrooms in SA — without the basic necessity of a dignified life.
Whose black lives really matter? The answer in SA is not a single black life matters under the ANC government. In the rest of Africa, black lives most definitely don’t matter. Those holier-than-thou leftist white liberals marching down the streets of American cities don’t even know where Africa is — they don’t know the lot of black lives in Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan or Darfur.
Have the Left-leaning liberals tearing down statues of people accused of being complicit in the slave trade many years ago never heard of Mauritania, an African country that still practises slavery? The slave markets of Libya and Mali also continue with their macabre trade in human life.
Where are the liberal Left, white, educated college graduates protesting at the embassies of these African countries? Far too busy with political correctness and lobbying for brands to change names and sports stars to “take the knee”.
Allan Wolman
Tel Aviv
JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an e-mail with your comments. Letters of more than 300 words will be edited for length. Send your letter by e-mail to letters@businesslive.co.za. (mailto://letters@businesslive.co.za) Anonymous correspondence will not be published. Writers should include a daytime telephone number.