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opposite page, from left: OZZY wears cotton dress 1 MONCLER JW ANDERSON, all jewellery stylist’s own. DAMILOLA wears all clothes ALEXANDER MCQUEEN, all jewellery stylist’s own. FAHD wears leather jacket MARCIANO GUESS, printed cotton shirt LOUIS VUITTON, wool trousers BOSS, earring his own. JUJU wears polyester vest CARHARTT WIP, cotton shirt BALMAIN, wool trousers PRADA The First Wave The only accurate word to sum up the events that took place in Nigeria in the month of October 2020 is historic. For two weeks, young Nigerians took to the streets across the country to call for the scrapping of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (Sars) – a rogue unit of the Nigerian police force known for carrying out atrocious acts of police brutality. The unit was created in 1992 in response to increasingly widespread cases of robbery, kidnapping and other violent crimes the Nigerian police force wasn’t able to properly handle. Vested with so much power, the unit, inevitably, began to abuse it. But the End Sars movement didn’t happen overnight – rather, it was a culmination of events that first reached boiling point in 2016. The archetypal victim of police brutality in Nigeria is young, male and usually alone – driving, walking, jogging, waiting, breathing, existing. Conducting stop-and-search tactics, Sars officials were known to profile their victims as criminals on the spot and charge them with offences they couldn’t provide evidence for. Dreaded or dyed hair? Definitely a criminal. Ripped jeans or tight-fitting gowns? A prostitute deserving of harassment. To Sars officials, facts seemed inconsequential. Stop-and-search scenarios often ended in arrests and, if the subjects refused to confess to crimes they hadn’t committed, violent threats. Some victims reported being denied access to a lawyer and forced to pay exorbitant sums of money for their freedom. A report by Amnesty International documented 82 cases of torture, illtreatment and extrajudicial execution by Sars between January 2017 and May 2020. In 2017, when young Nigerians took to social media to share their experiences of harassment and call for change, the first wave of the End Sars movement was born. The movement was convened in part by Segun Awosanya, a businessman and human rights activist who would often meet with police to help secure the release of arrested Nigerians, on Twitter in 2016. For their part, the police took a defence-anddenial stance on the matter, refusing to own up to abuses of power even after five Sars officials were arrested for the extrajudicial killing of two men in September 2017. But it didn’t matter: a chain of events had been set in motion that would unleash the largest protests the country had witnessed in a decade. The Second Wave Spurred by a video of Sars officials shooting a young man dead before stealing his car, another round of protests ensued in 2020, sparking a second wave of the End Sars movement. This time around, the protests exploded beyond social media and, on a hot afternoon on Thursday, October 8, young Nigerians kickstarted the most culture-shifting movement the country had seen in recent times through a series of coordinated, decentralised, peaceful protests. Influential Afropop stars Folarin Falana (AKA Falz) and Douglas Jack Agu (AKA Runtown) joined the protests, and what started as a call to dismantle a corrupt police unit soon grew into a wider fight for social change across all parts of the country. “I decided to step out because I genuinely felt that it was necessary,” Falz recalls. “We have had way too many cases of police killing, robbing and extorting young people. It was getting way out of hand and we needed to put an end to all that mess.” “Attending the protests last October was one of the most surreal experiences I’ve ever had,” says Tami Makinde, a writer at Lagos-based culture platform Native Mag. “My friends and I have been profiled and stopped by Sars [police] in the past, and I had a duty as a journalist to tell the stories of young Nigerians like myself. The energy on the grounds of the protest was unlike anything I’d ever witnessed. Young Nigerians from all backgrounds were united under a common cause. Anger was rife in the air, [with] chants resounding on familiar Lagos streets. It was liberating.” Rinu Oduala, who helped organise and convene protesters across several locations, says the movement is about the collective survival of young Nigerians. “I was compelled to go out and protest to increase public awareness and put a spotlight on the injustice and oppression happening in Nigeria,” the activist and entrepreneur explains. “Protests are the only language the government [seems] to pay attention to. Many Nigerian youths disappear every day, some get killed recklessly without cause while others are scarred for life – physically, emotionally, or both. There was the scary realisation that I or my loved ones may be victims of oppression at any moment. Survival was my propeller.” The protests were held together by a striking display of communal effort and selflessness. While there were people on the ground protesting, social media still played an important role, to raise awareness not only in Nigeria but the rest of the world, and keep the #EndSars hashtag trending. Beyond catching the attention of the international media, the campaign proved fundamental in uniting members of the Nigerian diaspora across the world, who also began staging protests and amplifying the mission of the movement. With an ingrained culture of divisiveness across class, ethnicity, state and background, among other factors, Nigeria does not have a tradition of coming together in the name of activism. “I wasn’t feeling very well on the first day of the protests [so] I decided to stay home and join people tweeting,” says Feyikemi Abudu, another prominent voice in the second-wave movement. “But when I saw pictures and videos of people sleeping overnight, right in front of one of the state-houses in Lagos – I have never seen us care about anything this much, and that really moved me.” Abudu, jokingly known as ‘president’, was at the forefront of organising and providing welfare for protesters, raising over 1.3m naira to pay for breakfast for people who were at the state-house. “My thinking was that, with all the demands that young Nigerians had, [the effort might take some time], and so if we were going to insist on our demands until the government did something, it had to be in a conducive setting for everyone involved.” This same spirit was reflected in the everyday Nigerians who also set up fundraising efforts, providing food and refreshments and even setting up a legal aid unit to bail out demonstrators arrested for protesting peacefully. Although the protests were peaceful, they were met with violence from the police. Demonstrators were hit with teargas, blasted with hot water from a fire truck and even shot at, resulting in the death of a young man named Jimoh Isiaka. Three days after the protests began, on October 11, the Nigerian government agreed to dissolve the Sars unit. But young Nigerians still had demands, including the immediate release of all arrested protesters and justice for families affected by police brutality. None of them would be addressed. Soon after, the Nigerian police force introduced the Special Weapon and Tactics Team (Swat), a new police unit charged with the same responsibilities as Sars. But with many ex-Sars officials permitted to join Sars subject to psychological examination and training, protests continued unabated. The tactics of intimidation and breaches of power didn’t text NELSON CJ 221

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