PODCAST | Where is the international outrage for Lindani Myeni?

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Just 18 minutes before four shots rang out in Nuuanu in Honolulu, Hawaii, on April 14, KwaZulu-Natal rugby player Lindani Myeni had been on the phone with his wife Lindsay. He had told his wife he would be home “soon”, but Lindsay and their two young children would never hear from him again.

Myeni was shot by officers in Honolulu’s police force while they were responding to a call about an alleged burglary in progress. He was outside and unarmed at the time of the shooting.

Police shootings have been a hot issue in the US for many years. Research by renowned US newspaper the Washington Post and business data platform Statista indicate fatal police shootings in the country are increasing, with 292 civilians shot — 62 of them black — in the first four months of 2021. In 2020, there were 1,021 fatal police shootings.

The rate of fatal police shootings among black Americans is much higher than that for any other ethnicity, standing at 36 fatal shootings per million of the population as of April 2021.

However, there is little outrage for Myeni, or sympathy for his widow and children.

Unlike the international news feeds that were overflowing with reports following the deaths of black Americans Daunte Wright and George Floyd, the international community is not screaming for investigations into Myeni’s death.

There are unanswered questions around the night he died, including:

• why he was at the house;
• why he had removed his shoes to enter the home;
• why if he was a burglar did he stop to talk to the home’s occupants and tell them his name and nationality;
• why all available unedited CCTV, police bodycam footage and Myeni’s personal effects have not been released; and, most importantly,
• why the officers at the scene did not indicate they were police until after he was shot.

For his widow and now single mother of two, none of it makes sense. The only way she will receive answers is if South Africans do not allow her husband’s memory to fade into obscurity.

Today on Boots on the ground: Behind SA’s biggest headlines, we bring Lindani Myeni to mind once again. We will relive the day before he was shot, we will consider the available information from the shooting, and we will look into his character as a new family man, hopeful immigrant, skilled rugby player and spiritual Zulu man.

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