Who were they?

who were they? by Makgosi Letimile

Content note: mentions of police brutality, ableism.

Covid-19 has brought the world to a standstill, but has also managed to shake the world on its very axis. As we are forced to experience a pandemic, both on and offline, I have no doubt that if we didn’t have the internet, we all wouldn’t be here —and that includes the creation of this zine. In different ways and to varying extents, most of the world is experiencing this virus and its effects at the same time -- thanks to digital media, we are witness to each other’s chaos and crisis.

And with all this access comes the constant heartache of seeing Black and Brown people being subjected to never-ending brutality — like I said, the world just keeps on moving, even as it feels like it might be ending. With a number of countries instituting lockdown measures to curb the spread of Covid-19, it also means that the Disabled are imprisoned by a virus, and by society as a whole. Society tends to forget about the Disabled. It’s not a new experience — there are homes where the Disabled have been left by family and friends, never to be seen again. History has repeated itself many times over and it still has to change. Until then, the Disabled have to see to it that the world doesn’t also forget them online.

In the chaos that Covid-19 has caused, Nathaniel Julius, a 16-year-old boy with Down Syndrome, was shot to death by the South African police for being outside, eating a biscuit and being non-verbal. He was non-communicative and he was killed. At the time, I was sitting in my house trying to ignore the heavy ache that set in my bones when I realised that he was probably isolating at home, and that the one time he had a chance to be outside, he was met with a bullet from the state. In my grief and my fury I then turned to the sadness of not knowing who he was, and who he could have been.

I didn’t know the young man. We probably would have never crossed paths in the outside world, but the internet introduced me to him, and I wanted to know who he was, as a Disabled young man in one of the poorest communities in South Africa. I wanted to know what his personality was like, what he liked to eat, what songs he danced to, what made his eyes glimmer and what put a smile on his face. I wanted to know who he was to his family and how they would describe him. All I knew was that he was a non-communicative 16-year-old who was killed by an ableist system.

And I wonder how other families and friends would describe the Disabled people in their lives that they may have left behind, during and before the pandemic. I became Disabled in 2016; I think that 2020 and Covid-19 are the ableist’s world’s great reckoning with Disability. For months, everybody knew what it was like to be denied this particular aspect of their humanity, and having to learn to live with it. People claimed to understand what being Disabled was like because they wanted to go outside and couldn’t. They were able to empathize for all of 48 hours before everybody started mentioning how a WHO sanctioned lockdown was abusing their rights. I’ve been observing the people in my life, and in society in general, and I want to ask them: besides our Disabilities, how else would you tell our stories if we were to be shot for going outside while Disabled?