Sisonke Msimang

Remember when an an infant was shot on the mothers back, remember when a young lady was raped in a holding cell, remember when they killed an unarmed protester, when hundreds of houses were brought to the ground on “municipal” land, Remember, goddamn!

You can be outraged at the City of Cape Town without sharing that video and causing further dehumanising. Please stop qoute tweeting, retweeting or sharing that video.

The disrepect continues because the system underpinning it has not been dismantled in @CityofCT and throughout the country. It continues because the inherent disregard for African lives in the system continues unabated, despite us being 'free'.

You can keep reposting the same tired response to the sm accounts you feel "matter" but what remains is that Cape Town a bastion of racism & dehumanization of Black people. It was YOUR officers dragging a man nude out of his home, not some 'incident'. Words matter. Be accountablehttps://twitter.com/CityofCT/status/1278358463148589073 …

The fact that this response by the @CityofCT is framed as a isolated incident of overreach by law enforcement is precisely the problem because it fails to acknowledge the despicable pattern of racist behavior towards poor, black people - no interdict can conceal that truth

I cannot believe we have to pay for your legal advisers, officials and *evictors* of poor, black people- in the middle of a pandemic, in a city with the most horrendous covid19 mortality figures to date. #shamecapetown

First dismantle the 94 compromise. The rest will be sorted out.

Let's just be blunt: The state in South Africa -- whether colonial, apartheid or since 1994 -- have never cared for the dignity and well being of black people.https://twitter.com/Sisonkemsimang/status/1278342206512717824 …

And Dan Plato, JP Smith and other @CityofCT and @Our_DA leaders will sleep like babies tonight in their warm beds after having relaxing warm baths. They won't even give this man - whose dignity they spat on, and whose home they destroyed - a second thought. #OnlySomeLivesMatterhttps://twitter.com/Sisonkemsimang/status/1278342206512717824 …

Often parents would still be searching for clothes while their children watched their nakedness in terror, and these men would bark “get dressed, let’s go.” So they came to be known as ‘Gqoka sihambe.’

These men with their batons, and I think guns, would bark and bang on doors, shattering the silence of dawn. People had to scramble and rush to open their doors, least the muni police break their way in.

It is the unbroken chain of colonialism’s dehumanisation and brutalisation of the administered. Apartheid had municipal police who would raid houses at dawn, looking for ‘illegals’ who were in ‘South Africa proper’ without papers or, more often, those behind in their rent.