#EndSARS and the Music Protest Tradition

Was it a choice? Looking back, I think not. You could not choose to sing the songs that we sang. I will never forget my first day at Lekki on the twelfth day of October: a Monday that was so unbearably hot that sweat pooled under my chest, when I arrived at the scene of protest only after an hour spent convincing my mother and father that yes, I did need to be there. Pushing past the red and white barricades, looking up at several youths hoisted on top of a platform, I heard them loudly sing:

To this, the youths below responded in kind:

Angling my phone up to catch the group as they sang in unison, I was struck by both the simplicity and the necessity of the ask: how many people would SARS kill? This was a question that many of our lives depended on. But asking it also implied that the people we were dealing with were merciless and murderous, so much so that the number they had slain could not be counted or accounted for. We, in effect, communicated the savage nature of those who hurt us and protested against that hurt in the very same breath. We said that we mattered and that we refused to bow to fear, even in the face of the murderous.