A Nigerian human rights lawyer, Emmanuel Ogebe, has launched advocacy for African Americans. In an email which he recently sent to News Express, Ogebe, managing Partner of the Washington-based US NIGERIA LAW GROUP, said: “Current global affairs have necessitated a shift in our human rights advocacy. While primarily focused on Nigeria and freedom of religion and belief, we’re now extending it to include racial justice advocacy for at-risk African Americans and minorities.

“This is because of our growing recognition that the problem of “one country/two systems” that plagues Nigerians in Nigeria also plagues blacks in America.

“The death, destruction and discrimination heaped against Christians in northern Nigeria is comparable to the death, destruction and discrimination experienced by blacks historically and even recently in America’s Deep South.

“Intellectual integrity and moral consistency demands that what we condemn in Africa must be condemned in America.”

In an accompanying analysis entitled, “2020 MASKED OUR FACES & UNMASKED OUR RACISM”, Mr. Ogebe wrote:

“Seldom in contemporary history could everyone in the world come to consensus on one issue – 2020 is a remarkable, memorable and decidedly not pleasurable year and this we figured out before the year was half done.

“The twin evils of the coronavirus pandemic which shuttered the movement of mankind, returning civilisation to cave-man hunting and gathering mode and the racist mandemic that uncluttered our eyes to man’s horrific inhumanity to man in George Floyd’s daylight extrajudicial murder were global phenomena felt from Switzerland to Swaziland.

“Racism exists on every continent in one shape or the other as it is a latent component of the human condition – it is selfishness and self-love elevated to group level to the exclusion of others – but it was the garish brutality of the daylight murder of Floyd on camera no less that rankled. Not even the mafia is so brazenly public in its nefarious murders.

“Most are keenly aware of the video that depicted Officer Chauvin’s knee on the neck of a prostrate and pleading George Floyd (his coworker at a club where they both worked as security) for over eight minutes.

“The image was so awful that when I first saw the photos, I thought it was an image from the ’60s or even slavery.

“Another thing that struck me vividly as a lawyer trained in a commonwealth country where execution by hanging exists is how the sentence pronounced by a judge is similar, “you shall be hung by the neck until you die. May the Lord have mercy on your soul.” To my mind, what I witnessed in that ignoble video was Floyd “kneed by the neck until he died” - an execution without a courtesy prayer for mercy on his soul.

“What I want to spotlight is not the infamous “knee on the neck” but something I find just as insidiously disturbing – Chauvin’s elbow over Floyd’s head.

“The elbow over the head is the evil twin to the knee on the neck – it’s all the institutionalised and less visible crucibles of silent asphyxiation of black careers, black ambitions, black promise and black life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

“The elbow over the head is a pronounced but unstated assertion of white privilege with impunity. In Floyd’s case, Chauvin aimed it at the begging bystanders defiantly and eloquently implying “I will do this and you can do nothing about it.” While the knee on the neck said “this black life doesn’t matter,” the elbow in the air said, “bystanders and witnesses don’t matter either.”

“The indifferent and unconcerned elbow above the head showed its impunity to George’s plaintive plea “I can’t breathe.”

“It happened to Rayshard Brooks too awoken from sleep in his car by the cops. He asked them to just be allowed to walk home and leave his car behind – his daughter had a birthday. The elbow of defiant indifference – she got his funeral instead.

“Ahmad Arbery didn’t have any last words that we know of. But you can see that sickening moment in the video when he fights for his life realiszing he is about to die hunted like an animal. His killers’ response that he shouldn’t have resisted – the elbow of defiant indifference.

“As a human rights lawyer I have seen countless terrorist videos of beheadings abroad etc. The victims were stoic. They accepted their fate but the killers were terrorists.

“With Floyd, Brooks and Elijah, it was the police. They had human interactions with them. They talked before they were killed. We heard them but the cops refused to hear them because of the elbow of defiant indifference.

“That may explain why I wept once over the gruesome Floyd murder but the murder of Elijah McClain has broken me into daily tears.

“I realise now that apart from being disabled (he was anaemic and autistic) and not having a fair deal in life, the sheer mercilessness of the cops who killed him despite all his pleading breaks me.

“The kid was pleading for his life. He apologised for not stopping walking because he didn’t hear them say stop. He said he’d never hurt a fly and wouldn’t make that mistake again and they STILL KILLED him!

“What kind of evil souls kill a begging kid?

“Even more shocking how come this child’s life didn’t get attention since last year? Black lives don’t matter till they’re killed but Elijah didn’t even matter in life or in death till Floyd died.

“I have been a human rights lawyer for over a quarter century. I have been abducted, imprisoned and tortured but the innocent poor boy pleading for mercy for committing no crime and being denied that by his executioners who were supposed to be his protectors broke me.

“I never wept for myself when I was imprisoned this time 24 years ago for advocating for human rights by a brutal regime. I weep now profusely for Elijah. I fled to safety in America but outlived Elijah who was only out walking.

“As I grieve for Elijah, I am alarmed by the elbows of indifference around me – white colleagues in advocacy for human rights abroad, posting on Facebook about stocking up on arms, bemoaning the destruction of their “heritage”, blaming absentee fathers in the black community and so on.

“I think back to the day early in my time in America when I asked a cop to kindly watch my baby in the car while I gave a friend who was traveling a letter at Dulles airport. When I returned I was surrounded by police cars and sniffer dogs.

“Now I realise that if a white person made the same request, they won’t have been cited as I was that day. However my experience in Europe where British cops would come to me and offer to take my picture in the pre-selfie era plus my legal background caused me to view the police as allies.

“Now I understand why I called and emailed the authorities on numerous occasions offering myself for interrogation if they had any questions about the victims of terror I brought to school in the US – and got the elbow of indifference. Rather, DHS agents ambushed me one day at their school in an illegal and bogus “national security” operation to “rescue” the Nigerian students from me.

“Despite never having been questioned by any agency before or after this incident on any wrongdoing whatsoever, the privileged white man behind this continues to troll me in the media by planting false and defamatory stories. If it could happen to an international human rights lawyer, what about the young unknown black kids?

“My kids and I attended a neighborhood Black Lives Matter rally organised by a former schoolmate of theirs. I find myself paradoxically in the rare position of protesting in America for the lives of my kids even as I protest for the lives of kids facing terrorism in Africa.

“The irony was brought home when our adoptive schoolgirl survivor of terror said her mum in Nigeria phoned concerned for her safety in America after the Floyd murder. She’d been shielded from racism for five years since she escaped religious terrorism but now it’s unmasked.

“Curiously, the twin evils bedeviling 2020 are related in an unusual manner. The protests resulting from racism mandemic could cause a resurgence in the COVID-19 pandemic at home and abroad after shattering the lockdown globally and potentially fattening the curve. “We may well see, literally, the fulfillment of Dr Martin Luther King’s warning that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

“But racism is also a public health risk to its vectors. Racists tend to have debilitating delusions of grandeur that make them believe that invincibility from the coronavirus comes with white privilege – no mask required.

“Some of the people who believe the gory history of their sadistic forbears must be flaunted in the faces of their victims’ descendants as “heritage” despite their obnoxious ideology haven been defeated in a bloody civil war, certainly have a corner lot on hubris.

Japan and Germany have been apologetic for their roles in the tragic world wars but from America’s civil war, the noisers are the losers of that war.

“What the world recoiled against was the elbow of indifference as much as the knee to the neck. Many will be traumatised by the forever etched imagery of grown man crying for his dead mum beneath an implacable, unhearing monster.

“An iconic moment in recent history comes to mind. At ground zero in the aftermath of the 911 attacks, President Bush said famously, “I can hear you and soon the whole world will hear you.” Then from Teheran to Telaviv, much of the world grieved with America at a time of grief at man’s inhumanity to man via terror bombings.

“Today the world grieves AT America not with America as we reach an anti-911 moment – “the whole world hears us but we can’t hear each other.”

“I am puzzled at my tears for an African American boy I didn’t know while my American colleagues are unconcerned for him. I am mystified that they are however concerned for non-American Christians killed in Africa when our faith should make us equally concerned for each soul.

“Maybe one day, students will learn in school that earth lost a significant number of lives in the year 2020, amidst a deadly viral pandemic, because humans were still killing humans on a deadly racial mandemic in the world’s top superpower.

“But for us today, let’s learn from Elijah’s last words recorded by the Aurora Police Department (Colorado) – the same police department that peacefully arrested the armed Aurora movie theater shooter after he killed 12 people:

“I can’t breathe.

I have my ID right here.

My name is Elijah McClain.

That’s my house.

I was just going home.

I’m an introvert.

I’m just different. That’s all.

I’m so sorry.

I have no gun.

I don’t do that stuff.

I don’t do any fighting.

Why are you attacking me?

I don’t even kill flies!

I don’t eat meat!

But I don’t judge people, I don’t judge people who do eat meat.

Forgive me. I’m just different.

All I was trying to do was become better.

I will do it.

I will do anything.

Sacrifice my identity, I’ll do it.

You all are phenomenal.

You are beautiful and I love you.

Try to forgive me.

I’m a mood Gemini.

I’m sorry.

I’m so sorry.

Ow, that really hurt.

You are all very strong.

Teamwork makes the dream work.

(Crying)

(Vomits)

Oh, I’m sorry I wasn’t trying to do that.

I just can’t breathe correctly.

I can’t fix myself.”

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