Does BLM resonate with South Africans?

Rhabia Ghoor, the founder of a Johannesburg-based cosmetics company Swiitch Beauty and her team found themselves at the centre of a racially incendiary social media storm after announcing that they would be making donations as a show of support, in line with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. 

Swiitch Beauty recently announced that they would be donating a combined total of R150,000 to businesses and aspiring make-up artists of colour in solidarity with the protests in the United States. 

Caucasian Swiitch Beauty customers immediately took exception to this and made sure to voice their feelings about not being eligible for the financial assistance. 

Steve Hofmeyr’s son, Devon, even went as far as leading the charge in getting people to drive the business’ Facebook rating down by putting out a call to all white people to go and give Swiitch Beauty rotten reviews for daring to do something about a problem that many others all over the world are trying to do their bit to solve.  

Devon Hofmeyr comment | Image: Screenshot (Facebook)

BLM recently gained new-found global traction after the killing of yet another unarmed black man, George Floyd, at the hands of police in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the United States. Floyd, who was killed towards the end of May, died after a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes as he told them “I can’t breathe”. The officer, Derek Chauvin, alleges that Floyd was being arrested for using a fake $20 bill in a shop.

 Additionally, Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old African-American emergency medical technician was fatally shot by Louisville Metro Police Department officers in mid-March after they forced entry into her apartment under the authority of a search warrant.

Floyd and Taylor are the latest additions to an already-long string of African-Americans killed due to police brutality. 

According to Washington Post’s Fatal Force tab, which tracks people who were shot and killed by police in the United States, 1003 people of all races died at the hands of police in 2019. These included cases of suspects who were armed, dangerous and trying to flee from custody. 

However, US News reports that although there is no comprehensive government data on the topic, an independently compiled database by organisation Mapping Police Violence found that more than 1,000 people died as a result of police harm in 2019.

According to MPV, about 17% of the black people who died as a result of police harm were unarmed, a larger share than any other racial group and about 1.3 times more than the average of 13%.

Like the deaths of Mike Brown and Eric Garner in 2014, Sandra Bland and Philando Castile in 2016, Floyd’s death dominated headlines for days on end, as did news of American retail giant Target being looted and vandalised. 

Since then, it has emerged that Target has had a long history with police departments all over the country. According to reports by publications such as AdWeek and Vox Target has funded various initiatives in these police departments such as cameras to surveil underprivileged neighborhoods. 

As more and more images of the protests emerge, black people and other people of colour all over the world find themselves wondering where they fit in the bigger picture, as well as what they can do to help.

Additionally, after having recently witnessed our own cases of excessive use of force against civilians, resulting in the death of eight people within the first few days of the lockdown, South Africans seem more lost about what they can do than they have ever been. 

This is one of the reasons for Swiitch Beauty’s donation. 

“The question should be why would it not resonate with a company? This would only be the case if the company had no black employees, it didn’t want to acknowledge that Black lives are in danger and essentially did not value the black customer. But at Swiitchbeauty we had a moment of  ‘Okay, these things are happening around us – how do we address them in a tasteful, impactful way?'” said Ghoor.

“I think from the get-go it was just really important for us to say something as early as possible and vocalise our stance. Our initial #BLM post went up on the 30th of May & included a poem written by one of our black team members. It was just a tribute to George Floyd & Collins Khosa and a way of highlighting police brutality against the black body,” she added.

“After that, I kind of went back to the drawing board and I was like ‘Okay, now that we’ve said what we’ve said – how do I back it up & actually aid in change?’ This led to the now-viral statement that went out on the 7th of June because there are a million black squares on Instagram right now and whilst awareness is incredibly important, I am lucky enough to have found myself in a position to create progression through dedicated, conscious action.”

Furthermore,  Ghoor said it was important to her to make a difference within her own industry.

“We’ve already received hundreds of applications & are currently sifting through them.”

According to writer and activist, Tshiamo Malatji, there is a sense that the Black Lives Matter movement has become a global phenomenon.

The movement was established to put a spotlight on systemic police violence in the United States, which particularly targets black people within the framework of white supremacy. 

Malatji is also the co-founder of not-for-profit, pro-justice media collective Lives Lost. The collective puts together data on police violence in South Africa, shares analysis articles, and develops public information to address police violence. 

“The extent to which it [BLM] has gone viral is likely because of how well organised the African American community has become but also their access to capital and proximity to whiteness, being black people within the United States of America which is very different to being black in Africa for instance,” added Malatji. 

According to the writer, African Americans have access to media resources and are part of a cultural hegemony whereas black communities in the rest of the world may not have the same access.

Malatji believes that the resonance of the movement in South Africa has been overstated, however, because there has not been as much of a show in physical solidarity as there has been in other parts of the world. 

“I think we’ve had a lot of social media conversation and indeed, a strong show of solidarity and support but I don’t think we should overstate the extent to which this has swept through South Africa.”

Malatji accounts for the fact that people may simply be respecting lockdown rules, but he strongly believes SA supports the movement more on a principled level than anything else. 

He is also of the opinion that we have our own police brutality problem to deal with, stemming as far back as the Marikana massacre and the death of Andries Tatane. 

“Until today, there is this sense that we aren’t getting this message across of police accountability.”

“There was a lot of conversation about that [Marikana the death of Andries Tatane] and a lot of uproar but not enough community organising, local initiatives, media campaigns, to ensure police accountability but we’re starting to see a lot of that now.”

This after a surge in the number of videos capturing the excessive use of force against civilians as well as the deaths of people like Collins Khoza who was beaten outside his home for allegedly breaking lockdown rules and later succumbed to injuries sustained during his beating.

This is over and above stories such as those of News24 reporter, Azarrah Karrim, who was first shot at in Yeoville with rubber bullets before being asked to produce her permit and Siyasanga Gijana lost her eye while fetching water in her own yard. 

Malatji would like to see movements rallying resources to enable to them to lobby for policy change and create accountability. 

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