LEKKI TOLLGATE MASSACRE 6 YEARS LATER

Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. —Simone Weil, letter to Joë Bousquet, 1942

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” – Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace

“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” – Steve Biko, I Write What I Like

On 30 April 1977, in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, fourteen women stood in front of the pink palace where the generals governed Argentina and asked a question that no one in that building had any intention of answering. Where are our children? Their sons and daughters had been taken in the night, from homes and workplaces and street corners, by men without uniforms who drove unmarked cars. There were no charges, no courts, no bodies. The officials told the mothers that the young people had never existed, or had run away to Europe, or had been guerrillas who deserved what they got. The junta had banned gatherings, and when the police came to move the women on, a sergeant is said to have told them they could not stand still but were free to keep moving. So they walked. They walked in pairs, in slow circles around the monument at the centre of the square, with…