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How #EndSARS Became The Protest Nigerians Unite To Defend

To the very end

Ezinne Ukoha
6 min readOct 12, 2020

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As a Nigerian-American, I’ve had long stretches of uncertainty about where I comfortably belong. It really is the sob story about how white invaders from God’s country, willfully violated the human right’s clause, and massacred cultural landscapes, rendering Black victims powerless for an eternity.

There’s also the tribal unrest, that erupted some years after Nigeria was granted what’s commonly described as “Independence,” when in truth, the crippling shackles of colonialism were never removed.

The stronghold of British imperialism left the deep-rooted scarring of self-hate.

That self-mutilation through the incurable disease of skin bleaching, ignited the damaged psyche that pollutes what it means to be Nigerian, since those former attributes were redefined by the traitorousness of Christianity and the greed of so-called missionaries.

It was always customary for young Nigerian students to seek higher education abroad, for the purpose of gaining “superior” knowledge from the white man, who taught them it was mandatory to learn from their captors to reassure further captivity.

My parents were no different, and promptly followed the trends of the sixties and seventies with the itinerary that deposited them in the United States for university studies, and during those academic years, they married and had kids.

We eventually left America and relocated to Lagos when I was about eight, which looking back, wasn’t the best age for that semi-traumatic uprooting, that introduced me to vastly surroundings that constantly challenged my ability to adjust.

My childhood was defined by the gangster era of the eighties in the thriving, former capital city of Lagos.

The polarizing experience featured back-to-back military coups, and the potency of a fractured government, that operated on the blueprint of bribery and corruption, funded by foreign powers with heavy interest in the business of oil, and zero concern for the environmental hazards that still pollute areas like the Niger Delta.

The strangling themes of a former British colony matches other territories with similar history, and it…

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