Collins Khosa’s death may not be the moment that creates the energy that we see sweeping across America, but it should be, writes Rekgotsofetse Chikane. .

To ponder on the liberation of black people the world over, is to evocate one’s own visceral and desperate need to learn how to breathe again.

The death of Collins Khosa at the hands of those meant to serve and protect him is not the result of the ‘over-enthusiasm’ of SAPS or the SANDF during a lockdown as the President has suggested, but rather the result of the amplification of South Africa’s deep and structural inequalities caused by our national lockdown. .

The lockdown has, for whatever reason, further solidified an already powerful belief in South Africa, that we will tolerate an acceptable level of human loss and suffering, to maintain and protect the status quo?

To ponder the liberation of black people must be collective in its purpose.

The liberation of African Americans is a necessary and essential step in the liberation of all those marginalised across the world. .

Therefore, to ponder liberation requires you to see this liberation as something that exists beyond our borders or forms of nationalism, which is why it is easy to link what happened to Collins Khosa to the death of George Floyd. .

But for South Africa, the answer seems to be no. 

The death of Khosa has become part of our country’s logic

His death will be just another marker of the ‘necessary cost’ of a national lockdown

A cost that is deemed acceptable because of the incessant need and desire for South Africa to reopen its economy under the same rules that created the inequalities that the lockdown has simply exacerbated. 

His death should leave us with the belief that we can use the crisis created by COVID-19 and the national lockdown as the justification for a reconfiguring of our country