testimony from work

police brutality in hillbrow (this is a neighborhood that is literally next door to braamfontein, when we take the bus to go grocery shopping each week we drive through it):

a nigerian who was trying to sell someone a tv from his electronics shop at 11am on a sunday was shot in the face with rubber bullets while the police performed some kind of unidentifiable raid on the sidewalk in front of his store. not only did he go blind and end up disfigured, but there is still a rubber bullet in his skull, which the hospital did not remove despite him paying the medical fees out of pocket. he didn't know they were rubber bullets, so he said, "at first i just lay down" [expecting to die].

i know about this because it was part of an interview i edited for work, don't worry, i wasn't an eyewitness or anything. be sure to bring this up when people are making the argument of "if anything goes wrong just call the cops, man, you can always trust them!" well, be a minority, and then you can't trust the cops. especially in a place like hillbrow. nigerians (and a variety other foreign nationals, or people originally from out of the country) are minorities here, even when their papers are in order, even when they are married to south africans and so are legally south african in terms of citizenship, even when they are part of the community and part of the economy, they are getting robbed and shot by the police. pretty much next door to our neighborhood.

not surprising that he wants to find a way to go back to nigeria now.