On October 20, 2020, as the staccato of bullets ripped through the air and people scampered in different directions, a popular DJ made sure the event was witnessed in real-time. 

DJ Switch flipped to her Instagram story to livestream the chaos — gore, live ammunition going off and victims lying in pools of blood — at a protest site in Lekki, a wealthy suburb of Lagos, Nigeria. At least 12 people were killed in that shooting according to Amnesty International, and DJ Switch now lives in Canada, having had to flee Nigeria for fear of reprisals from the government. 

That October, thousands of young Nigerians had been protesting over 13 days across the country against police brutality. The protests, aimed at a rogue police unit called the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, began after a video surfaced online of a police officer killing a young man in Delta, an oil-rich area of Nigeria. But what started as a protest against police brutality morphed into demands for better governance, which continued even after the government shut down the police unit.

Then came the atrocity at Lekki.