Adeola Adeyemo
In America, the stark cruelty of the video of George Floyd’s killing beneath a white police officer’s knee was the peak of a perverse constellation of racial injustice that sparked swelling protests across the country. In Nigeria, the rape and brutal killing of Vera Uwaila Omozuwa, a 22-year-old microbiology student inside her local church propelled and unprecedented wave of allegations against rapists and sexual offenders.
As a Nigerian woman living in America, I am broken by these two isolated but comparable events. There was no ambiguity in that video. An unarmed black man in Minnesota who posed no threat begged for his life for almost nine minutes as bystanders who tried to interfere were told to stay away. If that horror had not been captured on video, Floyd’s legacy would probably have been read as a black man who died while resisting police arrest. But it was, giving the world a modern-day view of a visceral execution.
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