Once again I wake up to an unprecedented number of violently disturbing images of our black brothers and sisters being attacked without remorse in our country. Just a week ago or so we learned about the cold hearted attacks of students in Garrissa university in Kenya where 150 were ruthlessly gunned down and 79 injured.
Reading tabloids or updates of such tragedies happening in other countries just doesn’t stick as hard as when it is just a few hundred kilometres away from you and in your own country. I still don’t understand why foreigners are being attacked but I understand the frustrations of the perpetrators. I do not support violent behaviour in any situation, although I must admit I have been both victim and perpetrator of this behaviour, growing up in the township and a densely populated part of a big city you find yourself having to defend and sometimes stake your claim in the social and civil battlefield.
I am a social media junky and expert, with that said before I even open my emails I check my notifications both on Twitter and Facebook respectively. All I see with the recent xenophobic attacks happening in Durban, a few months after the looting situation in Soweto. I am no professor nor Scientist, but I can’t help but think that with the rise of teen stabbings happening in all our townships where the majority of this country’s youth reside for the better parts of their lives, the gruesome images circulating on the internet that we comment on and share are extending this violent culture further and further. Now you might ask, how?
I took it upon myself to do a bit of research on the effects of images on the mind. “Whatever enters the mind through the senses can impress the mind”. This is what I mean; we’ve started behaving like Americans simply because we watch and listen to a lot of American popular culture, this influence is indirect, but listen to the youth’s favourite music, dance moves and how we talk (speech patterns). When people see an image of a man, hacked with a panga so many times that we don’t flinch anymore.
We are inactively endorsing it by sharing it to our friends and family. I made a statement recently that the attacks of journalists in Paris, Charlie Hebdo got worldwide coverage but we never got see bodies of the victims scattered all over the floor of their offices, we certainly saw the Boko haram burn victims in Nigeria, the Garrissa university student massacre and now the recent imagery from the Durban xenophobic attacks. I completely understand that journalists have a job to do, but to what effect does this kind of reporting have on our people? No respect for black lives, it’s a norm, where is going to happen next? I take a stand today to delete any all images depicting black bodies lying dead or injured due to violent attacks because I care about black lives. Will you take a stand with me?
I plead to our people to have respect for life and remember that “Simunye, we are one”