Whose Black Lives Really Matter

While millions of people not only in the U.S. but much further afield know of George Floyd, there are hardly a handful who know the name Collins Khoza. Both Floyd and Khoza were brutally murdered within a few weeks of one another and both by police action. The startling difference between these two murders were that George Floyd was killed by a white policeman and Collins Khoza murdered by black soldiers under the command of black policemen. Most of the world knows the tragic manner by which Floyd met his death but no one knows (or cares) how Khoza met his end.

Khoza lived in a little house in a neglected black area called Alexandra Township in Johannesburg. During the early stages of lockdown South Africa experienced one of the most ferocious regulations which in many instances bordered on the ridiculous. Soldiers and policemen attacked Khoza in his own yard after he was accused of drinking alcohol, an offence under those regulations.

According to witnesses, both the soldiers and police slammed his head against a concrete wall, hit him with the butt of a rifle until unable to walk and vomiting died a few hours later. A post mortem described the cause of death being “blunt force head injury”. A military inquiry later cleared the soldiers of wrongdoing and the  judge’s decision was to “suspend” the accused soldiers. There has been little outrage from the ruling ANC black government albeit that the family of Khoza are proceeding with legal action against the police and army.

The ex Mayor of Johannesburg recounted a visit to a poor lady living in a corrugated shack in the same township recently and asked the lady how she could managed living there without a bathroom – her reply was that she trained her body to use the bathroom when at work! Almost as tragic a story of Collins Khoza because one realizes that there are millions of people living without bathrooms – without the basic necessity of a dignified life. This in a country that has the greatest deposits of gold and other minerals in the world – that is endowed with a first world infrastructure that supplied electricity to many African countries as fare as the Congo, and whose rail network extended beyond the Congo. Today that rail network is almost non-existent and the power supply spasmodic with daily blackouts across the entire country.

There is of course the tragedy of thousands of schools in rural areas that do not have proper toilets but what is called “pit toilets” – simply a hole on the ground. There have been a number of reports of children falling into a pit toilets and drowning. For months all schools in South Africa were closed – those rural schools provided the only meal a little child would eat the entire day, but being closed the children went hungry – it took a court action by concerned NGO’s to force the ANC government to provide that only meal to starving kids.

Whose Black Lives Really Matter? Not a single black life matters under the ruling ANC black “democratic” government whose mission statement “A Better Life For All”– except of course those of the ruling elite who have deployed inept unqualified party loyalist to important position instead of people with the expertise and qualifications to manage the country, regardless of colour or creed. Then there is the rest of Africa where 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 – don’t even know the lot of black lives in Zimbabwe, DRC, South Sudan and Darfur. These left leaning liberals tearing down statues of people accused of being complicit in the slave trade have never heard of Mauritania, a West African country that only abolished slavery in 1985 but still practices slavery, a booming trade in that country. The slave markets of Libya and Mali 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 politically correctness and lobbying for brands to change names and sports stars to “take the knee”. Cry the beloved Country