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.
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 life. Before they married, she could only imagine what he experienced, piecing together fragments from stories she’d heard.
“Early on I was just learning what it meant to walk beside him,” she recalls. With time, she saw it firsthand. Late nights brought questions at checkpoints: Why is this Indian woman with you? Who is she? Saying “we’re married” might pause the interrogation, but the watching never stopped.
Their phone calls to landlords sound like this:
“Two bedrooms? Yes. For a family?”
“International”.
A pause long enough to carry meaning.
The broker calls the landlord—or pretends to—and returns with the verdict already framed as policy: “Society rules.” The door doesn’t close; it just opens rarely, cautiously, as if generosity must be rationed.
Sometimes landlords and brokers don’t bother to hide their prejudice. Sukruti and Kharell would arrive at the house with the broker and wait outside while he stepped in to speak with the landlord. When the landlord came out and saw them, the decision was instant. “There’s no way we’re giving them this house,” he said. The broker, visibly uncomfortable, tried to soften it, assuming Kharell didn’t understand Hindi. He did.
And yet there is another India the couple insist on remembering. They recall a metro policeman who shared a glass of tea with Kharell while retracing his steps to find a lost document. Two young men searched for hours and returned it to his gate the next morning. Kindness, too, exists—quiet and unheralded, until fear intrudes.
Kharell puts it plainly. In a football WhatsApp group with Congolese, Nigerian, and Ugandan peers, alerts travel faster than official help: “Watch out, be careful.” It’s a crowdsourced early-warning system born from a lack of institutional support.
Official figures count only about 25,000 African students across India’s universities, with 32,000 scholarships awarded since 2015. Yet even that small, visible population relies on WhatsApp threads for safety in a nation of 1.4 billion.
Travelling while Black
“Make sure you don’t do anything with the BlindianProject while you’re there,” my mother said from Kampala, her voice low and steady. My enthusiasm deflated like a hot-air balloon—a ridiculous image carrying unmistakable weight.
I was in Hyderabad for a week to give a talk titled How Black × Brown Love Can Help Save the World. It was a conversation about how cross-cultural relationships can become blueprints for empathy, compassion, and solidarity in a divided world. I’d always believed that sharing this story in India — in the place where so many of these dynamics begin — was where real impact could happen. Much of what divides our communities comes down to distance, so this talk felt like a chance to make that gap human again.
I’d also been following Leeroy’s story from afar, watching how quickly it risked becoming another headline and then a hashtag — #JusticeForLeeroy. I felt compelled to write, not to repeat what was already reported, but to share what it feels like to live inside these contradictions — to love a place and still have to name its silences.
For a moment I considered telling my mother I was only attending a wedding. I couldn’t. The BlindianProject — the community I started in 2020 to map Black × Brown cultural ties after marrying Swetha, a Telugu woman — is not something I can switch off.
Travel while being Black swings between applause and suspicion. Sometimes you’re stopped for photos; sometimes you’re watched as if you might be trouble. As I scrolled through the itinerary my mother-in-law had typed into her phone, it became clear I would have to travel to Guntur alone, by night train or bus. I dreaded the conversation. After a thousand practical questions, my in-laws relented. I accepted their worry — in India, they would be responsible for my safety — and it hit harder because we both already knew the pattern.
From that atmosphere, follow the music.
When rhythm becomes currency
Music travels faster than law. Hip-hop was born in block parties and community rooms—informal, collective spaces that turned rage into survival. The first South Bronx jams were civic action as much as entertainment. DJs drew power supply from street lamps, dancers claimed empty lots, and rhythm stitched people back together after displacement and disinvestment. That origin—political, communal, made in scarcity—locates these sounds in struggle, not flavour.
Those sounds reach Indian rooms as basslines and choreography. Quick and contagious, they get absorbed into wedding playlists, film songs, DJ sets, and weekend studio schedules.
Hip-hop and Afrobeats become social currency. They move rooms, move tickets, and make reels. Diasporic stars flood feeds. Their rhythms slip into film songs, wedding choreographies, and dance studios. The music is borrowed and replayed but rarely credited or reciprocal.
Meanwhile, artists like Mahi G — an Adivasi rapper from Maharashtra whose verses speak against caste and climate injustice — carry hip-hop’s political roots forward, often with little institutional support. So do small Tamil groups like the all-women Sollisai Sistahs, who use rap to challenge patriarchy and caste but still face closed studio doors and limited reach.
The visible payoff, such as trending clips and sold-out shows, rarely reaches the original creators as credit, repeat bookings, or royalties. Instead, a Black choreographer’s work goes viral. The clip is then picked up by a promoter and repacked as for an ‘Afro night’ or a wedding set. Later the moves are borrowed for film songs.
“I remember when I first started, studios here were teaching what they thought was ‘Afro’,” says Sneha Sandilya, a Delhi-based Afro dancer. “Then African teachers came to India for a workshop and I realised that what I’d learnt was completely different. The studios I’d trained with were doing Jamaican dancehall and misnaming it.”
Now she sees Afro steps everywhere. They’re in commercials, reels and wedding choreographies without giving credit to their originators. “I get invited to ‘Afro house’ nights. An hour in, there’s nothing; no Afro house, no lineage, almost no Black people. When I ask promoters why, they say, ‘If the audience is African, the venue owners will cancel us.’”
It isn’t just stolen moves. It’s stolen credit. Remember in The Social Network (2010), the Winklevoss brothers accuse Mark Zuckerberg of theft? In dance, credit disappears the same way.
This isn’t about just one routine but a familiar pattern in studios across India. Some songs are billed as ‘Afro’. The soundtrack leans on Afrobeats, yet the credits list neither a cultural consultant nor any African-origin choreographer. One training video even included the gwara gwara — a shoulder-swaying step from South Africa made famous by global pop videos — but the on-screen slate credits only an unnamed choreography team.
None of this happens by accident. It’s missing paperwork. In this world, attribution is the difference between landing just one gig and being able to pay the rent. Or between receiving a visa letter and another closed door. When the paper erases provenance, the market erases people.
Anti-Dalit, Anti-Black
This is where caste and markets converge. Producers, promoters, and choreographers control rosters, credit, and pay. In festival and wedding circuits, dominant-caste referral networks often decide who enters the room and who gets named. The problem isn’t a single bad actor but an interlocked machine.
The map looks something like this:
The pattern isn’t random. Anti-Blackness in India sits where caste, culture and colonial logic overlap. It is a script inherited and still repeated. Empires built hierarchies that decided who is ‘pure’, who is ‘polluted’, and who could belong. Those rankings never really disappeared.
Colonial rule left a template. The racial pseudoscience that justified enslavement abroad fused with caste supremacist ideas at home, creating a shared language of superiority that still shows up today.
You see it in who gets stopped by guards, who gets offered a flat, and who gets heard in a room. In universities, African students are welcomed as fee-paying guests but left unprotected in a crisis. In housing, landlords and brokers replay the same purity codes that still govern caste hierarchies. And across campuses and public spaces, private guards and police decide who is welcome and who is not.
Media and pop culture close the loop, turning Blackness into style while keeping Black people out of the frame. Viral clips criminalise Black and Dalit bodies while music and dance are borrowed, renamed, and sold back without credit. Even religion and ritual echo these hierarchies through ideas of cleanliness and contamination.
That’s how anti-Blackness and caste work together. Not through one incident, but through habits, systems, and everyday choices that reward imitation and erase origin.
That loop doesn’t stop at borders. Writer and academic Saidiya Hartman once wrote that “the afterlife of enslavement” lives in the ordinary. It lives in the quiet repetitions of hierarchy and harm that make violence feel inevitable. The details shift from place to place, but the logic stays the same: some lives are marked as lesser, some losses treated as routine. Leeroy’s death sits inside that pattern.
What the record says
Black presence in India runs deep. Malik Ambar, an Ethiopian who rose from enslavement to rule parts of the Deccan, led armies that shaped Indian history. The Siddi community, descended from Africans who arrived through trade and empire, still live across Gujarat, Karnataka, and Hyderabad. In colonial Mumbai, their descendants served as guards and seafarers, holding traces of that lineage. Yet recognition remains fragile, and violence remains cyclical.
Centuries later, that shared history would take a new form through education and cultural exchange. In 1951 India created the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) under leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru and Maulana Azad as a cultural-diplomacy bridge between the decolonising world rooted in Afro-Asian solidarity. Scholarships and study in India were part of that post-independence vision, documented in India’s own diplomatic records.
What the ledgers don’t mention is told in embassy notes, NGO dossiers, press clippings, student statements, and a thousand shaky phone clips. Amnesty International’s The State of the World’s Human Rights 2017–18 report documents racist mob attacks against African students in Greater Noida. More recent reports, including from Human Rights Watch, show that this pattern of impunity persists, as authorities continue to issue statements instead of ensuring real investigation and protection.
But India’s crime statistics don’t register race or xenophobia as motives. The true map of violence lives outside the record in phone clips, protest banners, this article and the memories of those who survive. When the state refuses to count, absence itself becomes policy.
What needs to happen
Friends describe Leeroy as warm. He was quick to joke and always in motion. His family grieves in ways that words can’t carry. What’s left behind is the ordinariness of a life interrupted—study snacks, late-night playlists, and the small pride of sending a photo home. Those are the fragments that make a life, and those are what the world has lost.
To prevent such crimes, India has to begin with the basics. Add race and xenophobia fields to crime ledgers so the record itself can tell the truth. And create a national hotline or state-level lines with interpreters that guarantee ambulance/police triage and instant escalation to the student’s embassy and university duty officer. African students say communication is the first failure. English may be common, but it isn’t universal. Real-time interpretation matters.
When Dilli Dark, a dark comedy about a Nigerian student navigating racism, identity, and survival in Delhi, premiered, the media lined up to review it. When Leeroy Ziweya was murdered, many of those same outlets fell silent. Which deserves more scrutiny? A film about racism or a life ended by it?
Leeroy’s death forces a larger question: What does India’s soft power mean if the nation welcomes Black culture but fails to protect the people who embody it? Phones can preserve the record, but only institutions and people together can deliver the remedy.
If you truly love the sound, protect the people who keep its beat. Celebration without protection isn’t admiration. It’s extraction.
We speak your name. LEEROY KUNDAI ZIWEYA. REST IN POWER.
Jonah Batambuze is a Ugandan-American interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and founder of the BlindianProject, a global platform exploring the intersections of Black and South Asian identities. His films Red Cross and Not A Rumor remix lived experience into stories of solidarity, culture, and belonging.
Not A Rumor premieres here alongside this piece, marking the artist’s first film release in India.