The Afterlives of #EndSARS

Five years ago, young Nigerians created a movement that was many things all at once. For two weeks in October 2020, #EndSARS was a mass offline movement across several states in Nigeria, as young Nigerians across ethnic, class and religious lines organized with hopes that their future could be different. It was digital activism that can be traced as far back as 2017, using Twitter for mass coordination and awareness. It was feminist organizing, with the Feminist Coalition emerging to not just counter the overrepresentation of men’s experiences of police violence and silencing of women, but also to speak for women, who often bear the harshest brunt of social movements. It was a queer statement, as #QueerNigerianLivesMatter insisted that a movement against police violence that normalizes violence against queer lives was counterproductive. It was class solidarity, as upwardly mobile people and less mobile people recognized their shared vulnerability to state violence. It was also an anti-colonial refusal of the policing afterlives of British colonialism and the indigenous elite's continuation of these structures.

What is police violence? What is state violence? How did #EndSARS help us define both? #EndSARS revealed these to be within the same oppressive cycle of power where underpaid, exploited police officers redirect their own precarity onto Nigerian young people through extortion, harassment and too often, fatal encounters. As a result, Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) officers targeted young people whose appearance and existence, locs, dyed hair, iPhones, being visibly queer, being a woman in ‘the wrong place’, were considered improper. #EndSARS showed how state violence operated: not just through individual bad actors weaponized by the state, but through an elite, exclusive structure that renders everyone unrepresented and oppressed.