There is a beautiful picture of Lindani Myeni and his family doing the rounds on social media. He is sitting next to his wife, the sea and a mountain rising up behind them, their two children nestled on their knees. Myeni is smiling beatifically, looking at peace with himself, his family and the world.
There are other pictures of him on social media. The rugby player in a tuxedo, his handsome face lighting up the world around him. Friends from KwaZulu-Natal have been posting memories and pictures of him too: the gentle man, the fervent Christian, the sportsman. In one series of pictures, his wife says: “He was gentle and loving and the best father and husband I could’ve asked for.”
Last Thursday police in Honolulu, the capital of the US state of Hawaii, were called to a home where a burglary was allegedly taking place. Myeni was sitting in his car outside the house. We know now that a fight took place between the three police officers on the scene and Myeni, who had been pointed out by the house owner as the person who had earlier allegedly walked into the house, sat down and taken his shoes off. Three police officers against one man. They did not identify themselves. They shone a torch in his eyes. They tasered him, shot him and killed him.
This is the point at which I write more words to humanise Myeni. He did not have a criminal record, I should tell you. He was not armed, I should say. He had no financial problems. He posted videos about God on social media.
It is infuriating to have to say these things to make a human being human. No human being, unarmed, should be shot down and killed by armed police. But Lindani Myeni, by all accounts a gentle soul from KwaZulu-Natal, was a black man in the United States of America. He could have been wearing a priest’s collar and gowns and he still would have been shot. Last week we read about a black man, in full US army uniform, who was stopped and assaulted by the police. Every day now there is another story of a black man being killed or brutalised by police in the US.
The New York Times wrote on Saturday that since testimony in the trial of Derek Chauvin (the policeman charged with murdering George Floyd a year ago) began on March 29, at least 64 people have died at the hands of law-enforcement officers in the country. Black and Latino people represent more than half of the dead. As of Saturday, the average was more than three killings a day.
I am tired of writing about how genial the black people who get killed or brutalised by police and white people in the US are. I wrote in this column about Botham Jean, a gorgeous singer and Christian who was sitting in his home enjoying ice cream when he was shot and killed by a police officer. The Harvard graduate and birdwatcher was set upon by the police, who were called by a white woman who would not leash her dog. And so on.
The truth is, one can be as respectable as ever one may want to be, as “nice” as can be, educated, docile, but the possibility of death is clear and present and urgent if you are black.
The words of Ron Johnson, a retired black police captain in the US, are instructive: “What I see sometimes is in these encounters with people of colour, there is a different aggression ... In some cases it’s about humanity. We don’t see them in the same human way that we see ourselves.”
Last week video footage was released showing a 13-year-old, Adam Toledo, being killed by a Chicago police officer. The footage shows the officer chasing the teen down an alley.
He shouts at the child: “Show me your fucking hands”.
The boy turns towards the officer, his arms raised, with nothing in his hands. The officer shot him dead.
These police officers are not bad apples. They are people who are trained to see black people as criminals, as a threat. This is what the police have been doing for centuries, from slavery to the US’s Jim Crow laws to the murders of civil rights leaders in the 1960s and the killings of black men and women today. This is the American system.
Over the next few weeks there will be protests about Lindani Myeni and others. By the end of this week other black men — and women — will have been added to this horrific, heartbreaking death count. They are all victims of a system that refuses to look itself in the mirror and admit it is racist and has nurtured violent racists in its law-enforcement agencies.
Lindani Myeni was not killed by bullets. He was killed by centuries-long institutional racism.
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