The Night I Heard Angela Davis: Legacies and Unfinished Activisms

Professor Angela Davis needs no introduction — the traveller, the scholar, the womanist, the pioneering thinker, the firing, the FBI, the fist, the hair ( :) ), the fire. She is the counterculture. She created the words we use to understand the world and question it.

She was the speaker tonight at 17th Steve Biko Memorial Lecture, on top of a hill in Pretoria, South Africa where UNISA stands. A place she noted is not far away from the Pretoria jail where Steve Biko was killed and died.

Through cheers, singing, standing ovations and emphatic sounds of approval throughout her great speech she spoke incisively with passion and hope. Prof. Davis, highlighted the resonances of the Haitian revolution in everything, Biko’s legacy, interconnectivity, the globalism of resistance and the questions and compromises of contemporary South Africa. She titled her speech, Legacies and Unfinished Activisms.

Here are some of my favourite things that Angela Davis said tonight, as I remember them and in the rough order she said them in:

“I should visit SA more frequently.”

“There is a disjuncture between what we once imagined as a future of freedoms; and the present, of unfreedom and injustice.”

“We (the black consciousness movement) could not imagine at the time how to address:

• general institutional racism
• hidden structural racism
• the psychic reservoir of racism

and that is why Obama, the first black president has been followed by a farcical election campaign including Trump.”

“Then, South Africa was our beacon of hope. As young activists we read African Communist and Sechaba…”

[Of PGHS protests] “South Africa never imagined that 2 decades later, people would have constructive protest processes meet militaristic advances.”

[On remembering the women of black consciousness and the women who marched on the Union Buildings] “We must remember the mothers of protest. The revolution we were fighting for became an unacknowledged backdrop.”

“Knowledge is useless it assists us to question the state, institutions, historiesideologies…and this questioning must not end even when the gains are won. We must find new strategies of struggle, continue to reveal the unfulfilled promises of the past and confront new and evolving contradictions.”

“Remember it was 3 black women who started Black Lives Matter, women of colour started Fees Must Fall.”

“Freedom is the freedom to learn. That students have to demand free education shows how retrograde our social priorities have become under capitalism. To demand free education is realistic when we live with a capitalism where education is a commodity. That is an OBSCENITY. The capacity to pay for education should not be the pre-requisite to access it.”

“There is a genealogy young activists share across oceans (Fanon, hooks, Garvey, Biko…). They stand on our shoulders but we do not provide a steady foundation. They sway, they question, they teeter and make mistakes, as we did at our age and we must allow that.”

“Veterans often take themselves and their knowledge too seriously. They assume their work will silence all future questions.”

“When we cannot find charismatic male leadership, this idea that stems from the male pastor in evangelical-like churches, they say our movement has no leaders. But our movement is feminist leadership. It is full of leaders. It is leader-ful. It is queer, trans, collective, inclusive and democratic.”

“Trans women of colour have brought us a new understanding of our institutions especially those of punishment. They agitate for the abolition of racism, gender-policing, heteropatriarchy and prisons as the dominant form of punishment.”

“We need to recognise the twin nature of this violence economy — the relationship between state violence and intimate violence.”

“To be human is to collectively struggle to be free.”

“[Of Black Lives Matter] Black lives are not fungible, not abstract. Black Lives Matter combats the tyranny of the universal. Saying All Lives Matter does not magically transcend race!”

“History tends to elude us in the very process of becoming. We can not really know what is an iconic moment but we can not let the potential for it to be one pass.”

“Perhaps Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand during the playing of a violent national anthem…or the girls of Pretoria Girls High School may be iconic.”

“Even though there are never guarantees we will reach the futures we dream of we CANNOT stop dreaming, we CANNOT stop struggling. There will ALWAYS be unfinished activisms.”

And at this incredible end I started crying a little. But I feel invigorated by her words and exceptionally glad I got to hear her speak

✊🏾✊🏾✊🏾