Back and Next - Back and NextThe Big Read: Wonder Women Warriors
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Soul-Powered Soul-Sister & Civil Rights Icon
- Professor Angela Davis
This is one remarkable human being. She was totally committed to the cause of fighting the oppression of black people in the United States. Dr Davis’ personal bravery eclipses even that of the venerable Dr M L King. Dr. King was with the masses on the frontline of the Civil Rights battles, and suffered accordingly. He was, nevertheless, shielded by his Southern Baptist Church Establishment and by his world-wide status as the leading light of the Civil Rights Movement – though in the end this did not save him from assassination by, believed by many to be, the FBI.
Dr Davis had no such cover for her personal safety, and her work with the grassroots black organisations, such as the Black Panthers, brought her face to face with the FBI.
The FBI was led by the fearsome and extremely vicious Edgar J. Hoover (It was said that Edgar Hoover even intimidated President Kennedy and his brother the Attorney General Robert Kennedy into going along with the FBI’s vicious campaign against Dr King and the Civil Rights Movement. I saw a photograph of Robert Kennedy talking to us as we sat on the immaculate green lawn of my old children’s home/school in Nairobi – I think in 1967. On the 1999 visit I was old enough to wonder whether the paper he was holding in his hand while leaning over us might not be an FBI report into Drs. King and Davis). But I wander.
Edger Hoover, the FBI and the local police forces viciously eliminated many members of the Black Panther Party – setting up well-prepared confrontations from which the Panthers had no escape except death in the overwhelming FBI/police fire-power.
Black Panther founder, Huey P Newton, ran across the border into Canada for survival and Eldridge Cleaver (of the Soul on Ice fame) went into exile in Algeria for many years. A few Panthers are still in jail thirty years later on tramped-up charges and the campaign to free them continues. The FBI won and the Black Panthers were more or less wiped off the political map of the US.
It was a tramped-up charge that brought Sister Angela to national and international prominence. But let us look at her early life first, for there we will find the reason for her extraordinary political commitment to the cause of Black Civil Rights.
Probably the most important fact is that Angela Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama – the most viciously racist place in the whole of the United States (See Dr. King’s phenomenal "Letter from a Birmingham Jail").
She grew up in a city as completely segregated as any in the Boer’s Apartheid South Africa, with "Blacks Only" and "Coloureds Only" signs all over the place. Segregation, official and unofficial, was present in housing, in schools, in jobs, at MacDonalds lunch-counters, and in almost all walks of life in Birmingham (the reason why Dr. King took his Freedom March there).
Angela Davis’s parents, both college-educated, had started off as teachers but her father soon moved into business and moved his family into a white-neighbourhood – where they knew that they were not welcome because several of the houses of black families in the area were bombed. It was as a teenager, she later wrote, that she developed an overwhelming desire to right the injustices against black people.
In 1963, while studying in France, Angela heard of another bomb in Birmingham: a black church had been bombed and four black girls had been killed. Angela knew three of the four girls.
Studying in Europe, Angela Davis had learnt of the mass movements, organised by vanguard left-wing parties, committed to the overthrow of the elites that dominated politics and oppressed the masses. On returning to the USA, she quickly linked up with the Black Panther Party and the Communist Party of the United States who had a "Che-Lumumba Club" which she joined. She got a job at the University of California. The right-wing California Governor, a certain Ronald Reagan who later became the President of the United States, attempted to fire Angela but she won her court case again – only for Reagan to find some other convenient reason to fire her anyway!
Her association with the Black Panthers soon gave the FBI an opportunity to go for her. One of her Panther colleagues and intellectual protégés, George Jackson, had been arrested and incarcerated in Soledad Prison on tramped-up charges. George’s brother, Jonathan Jackson, got hold of a weapon owned legally by Davis and held up a Court House with a view to exchanging the hostages for his brother and other Panther prisoners in Soledad. During the attempt Jonathan, two accomplices and the judge were killed. An arrest warrant was issued for Angela Davis’ arrest and the FBI put her on the "10 Most Wanted" list – the first woman to be so listed.
Angela Davis evaded police for two months but was arrested in New York in October 1970 – and spent 16 months in jail waiting for her trial. At the trial her case was very simple: "No, she had no emotional or sexual relationship with George Jackson, other than that he was a black prisoner – and yes she campaigns for the rights of black people and for the abolition of the prison system as it is in America".
"Yes, it was her gun, held legally, but she did not lend it to anyone. I have no idea how Jonathan Jackson got it". In June 1972, an all-white jury of four men and eight women acquitted Davis of all charges. So much for the FBI’s "Ten Most Wanted" list! Angela Davis’s reputation and iconic Black Power image spread all over the world.
"Soledad Brother" was one of the books I read then at school. Her education and beauty made learning sexy for us – and we even tried her Afro! Dr Angela Davis, with all her education and beauty, was our "Shakira" – and we sang "Angela don’t lie"!
Here is a photo of me in the 70s – on condition that all my readers agree that no one will utter a sound in laughter next time they see me.
Today, Dr. Angela Davis continues to lecture all over the USA – and she continues to campaign for the abolition of prisons in America.
- Winnie Madikizela-Mandela
Queen Mother of Azania
Fact: Winnie was the first registered black Social Worker in the country, male or female.
Fact: being a Social Worker opened Winnie’s eyes to the injustices and inequalities in her country and radicalised her views.
Fact: armed with her Diploma in Social Work and a Batchelor of Arts degree from the "up-market" Wits University, Winnie has spent all her working life fighting injustices in her country – against one of the most vile and oppressive racist regimes in the world.
Fact: Winnie is the single most popular individual in Azania (aka South Africa) today. If a "free and fair election" was held there now, August 2007 - and no American, British and Boer money was spent to influence the outcome - Winnie would be the new President of Azania by a landslide. Not a single politician there, including Mbeki, has the massive popularity that this lady has with the ordinary people of her country. Of course, the middle-class and newly rich blacks, and the Boers, detest the woman we ordinary Africans love.
Fact: We want Winnie in State House, Biko City (aka Pretoria). They want Winnie in jail. We won’t get our way – there is too much American, British, Boer and Wealthy-Black money against us. They won’t get there way either – because the ordinary people will burn the country down if they put her in jail.
It is stalemate. But who is this remarkable lady?
"Nomzamo", which means "she who will survive trials", was the name her family gave to the newly born Winnie. She was born in 1936 in the Transkei region of Azania and her family were fairly well-off by African standards under White Rule.
Winnie had seven brothers and sisters and experienced her first major loss at the age of eight when her mother, a teacher, died (only 3 of her siblings survive today). It is said that this loss, combined with that of losing her new husband Nelson for 27 years, made Winnie the formidable individual that she turned out to be. In those days when we Africans would give an arm for a ticket to the West, Winnie turned down a scholarship to the USA – because she was committed to the struggle against Apartheid and remained at home to fight for her people.
At college and university Winnie encountered and got involved with the ANC. She was arrested and locked up for the first time in 1958 when she was Chair of the Orlando West Branch of the ANC. She still campaigned against the apartheid laws which she defiantly urged black people to disobey. Although Winnie met and married Nelson Mandela in June 1958, Winnie was a formidable political individual in her own right and grew into the iconic freedom fighter that she turned out to be almost entirely on her own without Nelson by her side.
Winnie’s political constituency was always the ANC Women’s Wing – from where she was provided with love and unflinching support during the dark days of Boer Rule. Even when the ANC abandoned her in recent years the Women’s League defiantly elected her as their President – against the wishes of the ANC hierarchy.
A very charismatic individual, Winnie makes enemies easily amongst the toady functionaries of party and state, yet the same charisma means that she captivates her followers and those who love her. Demonized by the white-press, who see her as potentially South Africa’s Mugabe, she is loved with the same intensity by the ordinary blacks amongst whom she lived in Soweto and still continues to live – when the newly-rich blacks have moved out of black areas to live with the whites.
When her husband Nelson Mandela was jailed in 1962, Winnie too was "banned" – i.e. imprisoned in her home town of Soweto. Defiant Winnie broke the banning orders and ended up with jail sentences.
The toughest of these arrests and jailings was in 1969 when Winnie was detained and spent 18 months in solitary confinement on the "Death Row" wing of Pretoria Prison – under the Terrorism Act! Released from Kroonstad Prison in 1975, Winnie threw herself into the organizing of the Soweto Uprising of 1976 and was promptly arrested and sent to jail again.
Six months in jail was followed by nine years of confinement to the remote town of Brandford in the Boer dominated Orange Free State – she was to live in the black slum area! The Boers bombed her house there trying to kill her – twice. Defiantly she broke the banning order for visits to Soweto and ended up in prison again.
Winnie’s supporters formed the Mandela Football Team which became her bodyguard. There is not much doubt that without the protection of the "Football Team", Winnie would not have lived to see Nelson Mandela released and Azania become an independent country.
It is said that the "Football Team" became a powerful force that terrorized people who opposed Winnie Mandela – but then Winnie was herself terrorized by the Apartheid State that made these claims and she suffered for over 30 years at their hands. Once Nelson Mandela was released and black majority rule became inevitable, the functionaries of the oppressive former-Apartheid State combined with those struggling for positions, power and wealth within the new ANC government to neutralize Winnie Madikileza-Mandela – the indomitable warrior for black liberation.
Charged with many "crimes", supposedly committed by the Football Team under her orders, and finally cleared by a court of law, Winnie remains as defiant and indomitable as ever – and just as popular.
What of Winnie and Nelson? Winnie had had to deal with her husband’s absence for 27 years and carry on with the struggle for her peoples’ liberation and one has to admit that she earned heroic status in doing that. Nelson too had to deal with 27 years of imprisonment and he too dealt with that well.
Nelson came out of prison an old man bent on appeasing the Boers so that they felt at home in the New South Africa. Winnie was a fiery and relatively young woman whose inclination would have been to give the Boers just a slight taste of the hell that they gave black Africans for four hundred years.
Nelson and Winnie had two different attitudes and two different temperaments: they just couldn’t live together as husband and wife in the new country they both fought for. The West, the Boers, and the Big Money preferred Nelson – without Winnie.
Freedom Essays by Dida Halake is available at Timbooktoo in Bakau New Town.
- Professor Angela Davis
This is one remarkable human being. She was totally committed to the cause of fighting the oppression of black people in the United States. Dr Davis’ personal bravery eclipses even that of the venerable Dr M L King. Dr. King was with the masses on the frontline of the Civil Rights battles, and suffered accordingly. He was, nevertheless, shielded by his Southern Baptist Church Establishment and by his world-wide status as the leading light of the Civil Rights Movement – though in the end this did not save him from assassination by, believed by many to be, the FBI.
Dr Davis had no such cover for her personal safety, and her work with the grassroots black organisations, such as the Black Panthers, brought her face to face with the FBI.
The FBI was led by the fearsome and extremely vicious Edgar J. Hoover (It was said that Edgar Hoover even intimidated President Kennedy and his brother the Attorney General Robert Kennedy into going along with the FBI’s vicious campaign against Dr King and the Civil Rights Movement. I saw a photograph of Robert Kennedy talking to us as we sat on the immaculate green lawn of my old children’s home/school in Nairobi – I think in 1967. On the 1999 visit I was old enough to wonder whether the paper he was holding in his hand while leaning over us might not be an FBI report into Drs. King and Davis). But I wander.
Edger Hoover, the FBI and the local police forces viciously eliminated many members of the Black Panther Party – setting up well-prepared confrontations from which the Panthers had no escape except death in the overwhelming FBI/police fire-power.
Black Panther founder, Huey P Newton, ran across the border into Canada for survival and Eldridge Cleaver (of the Soul on Ice fame) went into exile in Algeria for many years. A few Panthers are still in jail thirty years later on tramped-up charges and the campaign to free them continues. The FBI won and the Black Panthers were more or less wiped off the political map of the US.
It was a tramped-up charge that brought Sister Angela to national and international prominence. But let us look at her early life first, for there we will find the reason for her extraordinary political commitment to the cause of Black Civil Rights.
Probably the most important fact is that Angela Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama – the most viciously racist place in the whole of the United States (See Dr. King’s phenomenal "Letter from a Birmingham Jail").
She grew up in a city as completely segregated as any in the Boer’s Apartheid South Africa, with "Blacks Only" and "Coloureds Only" signs all over the place. Segregation, official and unofficial, was present in housing, in schools, in jobs, at MacDonalds lunch-counters, and in almost all walks of life in Birmingham (the reason why Dr. King took his Freedom March there).
Angela Davis’s parents, both college-educated, had started off as teachers but her father soon moved into business and moved his family into a white-neighbourhood – where they knew that they were not welcome because several of the houses of black families in the area were bombed. It was as a teenager, she later wrote, that she developed an overwhelming desire to right the injustices against black people.
In 1963, while studying in France, Angela heard of another bomb in Birmingham: a black church had been bombed and four black girls had been killed. Angela knew three of the four girls.
Studying in Europe, Angela Davis had learnt of the mass movements, organised by vanguard left-wing parties, committed to the overthrow of the elites that dominated politics and oppressed the masses. On returning to the USA, she quickly linked up with the Black Panther Party and the Communist Party of the United States who had a "Che-Lumumba Club" which she joined. She got a job at the University of California. The right-wing California Governor, a certain Ronald Reagan who later became the President of the United States, attempted to fire Angela but she won her court case again – only for Reagan to find some other convenient reason to fire her anyway!
Her association with the Black Panthers soon gave the FBI an opportunity to go for her. One of her Panther colleagues and intellectual protégés, George Jackson, had been arrested and incarcerated in Soledad Prison on tramped-up charges. George’s brother, Jonathan Jackson, got hold of a weapon owned legally by Davis and held up a Court House with a view to exchanging the hostages for his brother and other Panther prisoners in Soledad. During the attempt Jonathan, two accomplices and the judge were killed. An arrest warrant was issued for Angela Davis’ arrest and the FBI put her on the "10 Most Wanted" list – the first woman to be so listed.
Angela Davis evaded police for two months but was arrested in New York in October 1970 – and spent 16 months in jail waiting for her trial. At the trial her case was very simple: "No, she had no emotional or sexual relationship with George Jackson, other than that he was a black prisoner – and yes she campaigns for the rights of black people and for the abolition of the prison system as it is in America".
"Yes, it was her gun, held legally, but she did not lend it to anyone. I have no idea how Jonathan Jackson got it". In June 1972, an all-white jury of four men and eight women acquitted Davis of all charges. So much for the FBI’s "Ten Most Wanted" list! Angela Davis’s reputation and iconic Black Power image spread all over the world.
"Soledad Brother" was one of the books I read then at school. Her education and beauty made learning sexy for us – and we even tried her Afro! Dr Angela Davis, with all her education and beauty, was our "Shakira" – and we sang "Angela don’t lie"!
Here is a photo of me in the 70s – on condition that all my readers agree that no one will utter a sound in laughter next time they see me.
Today, Dr. Angela Davis continues to lecture all over the USA – and she continues to campaign for the abolition of prisons in America.
- Winnie Madikizela-Mandela
Queen Mother of Azania
Fact: Winnie was the first registered black Social Worker in the country, male or female.
Fact: being a Social Worker opened Winnie’s eyes to the injustices and inequalities in her country and radicalised her views.
Fact: armed with her Diploma in Social Work and a Batchelor of Arts degree from the "up-market" Wits University, Winnie has spent all her working life fighting injustices in her country – against one of the most vile and oppressive racist regimes in the world.
Fact: Winnie is the single most popular individual in Azania (aka South Africa) today. If a "free and fair election" was held there now, August 2007 - and no American, British and Boer money was spent to influence the outcome - Winnie would be the new President of Azania by a landslide. Not a single politician there, including Mbeki, has the massive popularity that this lady has with the ordinary people of her country. Of course, the middle-class and newly rich blacks, and the Boers, detest the woman we ordinary Africans love.
Fact: We want Winnie in State House, Biko City (aka Pretoria). They want Winnie in jail. We won’t get our way – there is too much American, British, Boer and Wealthy-Black money against us. They won’t get there way either – because the ordinary people will burn the country down if they put her in jail.
It is stalemate. But who is this remarkable lady?
"Nomzamo", which means "she who will survive trials", was the name her family gave to the newly born Winnie. She was born in 1936 in the Transkei region of Azania and her family were fairly well-off by African standards under White Rule.
Winnie had seven brothers and sisters and experienced her first major loss at the age of eight when her mother, a teacher, died (only 3 of her siblings survive today). It is said that this loss, combined with that of losing her new husband Nelson for 27 years, made Winnie the formidable individual that she turned out to be. In those days when we Africans would give an arm for a ticket to the West, Winnie turned down a scholarship to the USA – because she was committed to the struggle against Apartheid and remained at home to fight for her people.
At college and university Winnie encountered and got involved with the ANC. She was arrested and locked up for the first time in 1958 when she was Chair of the Orlando West Branch of the ANC. She still campaigned against the apartheid laws which she defiantly urged black people to disobey. Although Winnie met and married Nelson Mandela in June 1958, Winnie was a formidable political individual in her own right and grew into the iconic freedom fighter that she turned out to be almost entirely on her own without Nelson by her side.
Winnie’s political constituency was always the ANC Women’s Wing – from where she was provided with love and unflinching support during the dark days of Boer Rule. Even when the ANC abandoned her in recent years the Women’s League defiantly elected her as their President – against the wishes of the ANC hierarchy.
A very charismatic individual, Winnie makes enemies easily amongst the toady functionaries of party and state, yet the same charisma means that she captivates her followers and those who love her. Demonized by the white-press, who see her as potentially South Africa’s Mugabe, she is loved with the same intensity by the ordinary blacks amongst whom she lived in Soweto and still continues to live – when the newly-rich blacks have moved out of black areas to live with the whites.
When her husband Nelson Mandela was jailed in 1962, Winnie too was "banned" – i.e. imprisoned in her home town of Soweto. Defiant Winnie broke the banning orders and ended up with jail sentences.
The toughest of these arrests and jailings was in 1969 when Winnie was detained and spent 18 months in solitary confinement on the "Death Row" wing of Pretoria Prison – under the Terrorism Act! Released from Kroonstad Prison in 1975, Winnie threw herself into the organizing of the Soweto Uprising of 1976 and was promptly arrested and sent to jail again.
Six months in jail was followed by nine years of confinement to the remote town of Brandford in the Boer dominated Orange Free State – she was to live in the black slum area! The Boers bombed her house there trying to kill her – twice. Defiantly she broke the banning order for visits to Soweto and ended up in prison again.
Winnie’s supporters formed the Mandela Football Team which became her bodyguard. There is not much doubt that without the protection of the "Football Team", Winnie would not have lived to see Nelson Mandela released and Azania become an independent country.
It is said that the "Football Team" became a powerful force that terrorized people who opposed Winnie Mandela – but then Winnie was herself terrorized by the Apartheid State that made these claims and she suffered for over 30 years at their hands. Once Nelson Mandela was released and black majority rule became inevitable, the functionaries of the oppressive former-Apartheid State combined with those struggling for positions, power and wealth within the new ANC government to neutralize Winnie Madikileza-Mandela – the indomitable warrior for black liberation.
Charged with many "crimes", supposedly committed by the Football Team under her orders, and finally cleared by a court of law, Winnie remains as defiant and indomitable as ever – and just as popular.
What of Winnie and Nelson? Winnie had had to deal with her husband’s absence for 27 years and carry on with the struggle for her peoples’ liberation and one has to admit that she earned heroic status in doing that. Nelson too had to deal with 27 years of imprisonment and he too dealt with that well.
Nelson came out of prison an old man bent on appeasing the Boers so that they felt at home in the New South Africa. Winnie was a fiery and relatively young woman whose inclination would have been to give the Boers just a slight taste of the hell that they gave black Africans for four hundred years.
Nelson and Winnie had two different attitudes and two different temperaments: they just couldn’t live together as husband and wife in the new country they both fought for. The West, the Boers, and the Big Money preferred Nelson – without Winnie.
Freedom Essays by Dida Halake is available at Timbooktoo in Bakau New Town.
Author: DO
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