"In these images you will see sadness. You will see boys and girls, men and women with their shoulders stooped, looking down, some watching out for a sign and others waiting for a spark, a signal perhaps, that what is dead might yet live again.
This will be one of those days when that wait will be endless, even meaningless, because the protest they came for has been canceled.
.
Many years after today, when we remember this period, we will remember it as the time when Nigerian youths stood tall and towered above their parents and all the generations before them and demanded for change.
We will remember it for the time when the Nigerian Police met our peaceful protests with violence, when they killed Jimoh Isiaq in cold blood for daring to want better, when they harassed and battered young women and men who were only exercising their right to freedom.
We will look at these images and wonder what happened. Why did people not show up for these protests in a town whose forebears dethroned a king through the act of protest and we will call some of these people cowards.
But this won’t be the true story, nobody is a coward in a country ran by fascists. What these images won’t tell you about are the boys who were charged with murder just because they committed the sin of demanding better in this same town.
These images won’t show you the depth of their scars, the hunger pangs from their night behind the police counter. What these images will show you instead is a people unbowed despite everything.
Our demands are still as clear as day. We demand a stop to impunity and an end to Police Brutality."
- Tolu Daniel
📷Scene of Protest venue (Panseke Abeokuta)
Mon 12 October 2020
#endpolicebrutality
#sarsmustend
#endinjustice
@ Abeokuta
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