COMMUNITY
George Floyd’s Death Inspires Protests Against Decades Of Police Violence Against Africans In KenyaInterview Of Lilly Bekele-Piper, A Protest Organizer
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n resolute outrage for the brazen public execution of George Floyd – unarmed, handcuffed and showing no resistance – by a police officer who steadily and arrogantly bore his knee into his neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds while George Floyd pleaded for air and called for his dead mother, protests boomed with widespread clamor against white police brutality and racism. Protests also rallied support for the Black Lives Matter movement. Demonstrations mushroomed in major cities, not just across the United States of America, but across cities in over 60 countries spanning six continents! While the reaction to the execution of George Floyd may have been the impetus of the protests that took place in Nairobi on June 9, 2020, the day George Floyd was buried, Kenyans, shocked, and alarmed by what they were witnessing in the U.S., felt so passionately enraged about his brutal killing that protests took place in different parts of Nairobi. “They were reminded of the same patterns of police brutality and extrajudicial killings and injustices happening in Kenya,” said Lilly BekelePiper. Lilly Bekele-Piper, an Ethiopian-born American resident living in Kenya in a small community of Black Americans
22 JULY - AUGUST 2020 EL RAVENSWOOD
and the Creator and Executive Producer of Up/Root (https://linktr. ee/uprootthepodcast), a podcast that narrates global stories of joy, justice and resilience, was one of the collaborators and organizers of the June 9 protests. George Floyd may be the name that the world knows, but, in Kenya, people remember Yassin Moyo and Carlton Maina, victims of police killings. On March 31, 2020, during COVID-19 imposed overnight curfew, Yassin Hussein Moyo, a 13-year-old schoolboy, was shot and killed by a police officer while he stood with his siblings on the balcony of his home. Carlton David Maina was a college student in England, home for the Christmas holidays in 2018, when he was killed while walking home after a soccer match. Lily Bekele-Piper was born in Ethiopia in 1976 to parents who fled Addis Ababa for the U.S. when she was a toddler during the Ethiopian postcommunist revolution. She obtained her undergraduate degree at Wake Forest University in North Carolina and worked in South Carolina for many years before relocating to Boston in 2003, where she obtained her master’s in international education policy at Harvard University. Lilly lived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia with her family from 2007 to 2011, when she moved to Kenya. “I cannot speak for Kenyans on the depths to which Kenyans understand
racism in America but despite that, it is clear to me that Kenyans understand oppression … and what it means to have alien systems in your own country work against you.” “The current structure and culture of law enforcement in Kenya arose from colonial laws from 60 or 70 years ago… Those laws, designed to serve an oppressive British colonial government have never changed.” With that piece of history, Lilly sees similarities with the United States in terms of how policing emerged. “U.S. law enforcement structures and the
