He died eight days after an attack outside his university gates. On August 13, 22-year-old Leeroy Kundai Ziweya, a Zimbabwean BSc student at Guru Kashi University in Punjab, was assaulted with sticks and sharp objects. He was rushed to AIIMS Bathinda, where he later died. Local press reported eight men were involved. Police say they found no evidence of a racial motive. On August 27, The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) issued notices to Punjab’s Director General of Police (DGP) and the university registrar seeking a detailed report.

“We met at an African party in Chandigarh. Leeroy ran the Indian Varsities Connect Instagram page,” says Lesley Zimunhu, a former Maharaja Sayajirao University (MSU) of Baroda student who organised African events across Gujarat and Chandigarh.

“Before we shook hands, he’d already DM’d: ‘Man, I’ll post it for free.’ He charged others, not me.” After gigs, they’d grab a drink with Afrobeats still pulsing, two sons of Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital city, sharing a chapter of their lives in India, building a friendship out of flyers, bass, and late-night messages.

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In Mumbai, a DJ drops a hip-hop beat at Desi Trill’s Rap Kar cypher — a ritual born from Black resistance. In Bathinda, staff wheel Leeroy through a hospital corridor—cold tube lights, the sting of antiseptic. The bass pulsates; his heart does not.

This wasn’t an isolated act. Leeroy’s assault wasn’t filmed, but it sits inside a public record of other cases made visible through YouTube clips, embassy protests, and press archives.

India loves Black rhythm. But its systems don’t love Black lives.

If you truly love Black culture, protect it. Celebration without protection isn’t admiration; it’s extraction.

A pattern of anti-Black racism

In October 2014, Delhi Metro footage showed three African students cornered and attacked by a mob while commuters filmed. Outrage followed, then statements and brief follow-up. In March 2017, a Greater Noida mall video captured crowds swinging chairs and sticks at African students as bystanders recorded. Arrests came, diplomats demanded answers, and yet the spectacle and the precarity it revealed persisted.

Everyone holds a phone now, but few hold responsibility. As Arundhati Roy reminds us, silence too can be a weapon. The crowd that records but does not act becomes part of the scene.

The script is familiar: a suspended officer, a hurried arrest, a press note. Call it by its name, so it cannot masquerade as justice.

Now listen for the smaller stories—surveillance, refusals, exclusions—that accumulate into an atmosphere.

“People are mostly kind,” Lesley tells me. “But once a line is crossed, it can go very badly. And it’s rarely one-on-one. It’s always a crowd, as if people have been told Africans carry some kind of superhuman power.”

That myth isn’t new. It comes from colonial pseudoscience that once painted Black people as both dangerous and superhuman. These stories were designed to justify control and punishment. The same logic shaped how the British ranked everyone they ruled, including Indians: by skin tone, caste, and region. Lighter-skinned people were considered more ‘civilised’. Darker skin tones were associated with danger.

Those hierarchies never disappeared. They show up in what we watch and post. And in casting choices, online jokes, and viral comments about who looks ‘clean’ or ‘dirty’. The gaze that once belonged to colonisers now plays out through our cameras, deciding who is celebrated and who is seen as a threat.

Closed doors

Early in their relationship in New Delhi, Sukruti Anah Stanley, a creative director, and her husband, Kharell Misakabo Bompaka, a teacher and language expert, began to understand what race and belonging mean in everyday........

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