Ainehi Edoro: 60 intellectuals. One bus. 47 hours of road
time. And the theme: "The Archives of the Non-Racial." What is your
sense of what this intellectual project is about?
Angela Davis: The project
is informed by place and space. This was the attraction for me---our movement
from Johannesburg to Swaziland to the Eastern Cape to the Western Cape. I have
visited South Africa on three other occasions, but this is the first that I’ve
been able to acquire a real sense of space. Of course, it also has to do with
the kinds of conversations that have been happening around the question of race
and political struggle. I was primarily interested in this project because most
of my political life, which is most of my life, has been informed by the
struggle in South Africa.
Ainehi Edoro: Can you
tell us a bit about your life---growing up in the south and entering into a
life of political activism.
Angela Davis: I grew up
in a racially segregated city--- Birmingham, Alabama--- a city that was known
as the Johannesburg of the south. So my entire life, in many respects, has been
informed by an anti-racist political project. I’m interested in how people,
intellectuals---organic intellectuals---cultural workers, imagine the
possibilities of moving beyond racism.
I often tell a story
about my mother trying to me help understand why it was that we lived in a
place where black people where treated as inferior and systematically excluded
from education, amusement parks, libraries. As a child, I constantly asked my
mother why. And I’m very fortunate that,
as an activist herself, she had her vision. She always insisted that we
inhabited a world that was not supposed to be structured that way. She helped me live in that reality without
feeling as though I was fundamentally of that reality.
I eventually became
involved in the campaign to free Nelson Mandela. I was very young. I could
probably tell the story of my political life by pointing to various moments in
the history of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. For many years, South Africa was the center
of the world in the sense that it was here that we invested all of our
aspirations. But as with most investments that are as absolute and total as
this one was, it didn’t turn out in the way we had all imagined.
Ainehi Edoro: How had you
imagined it?
Angela Davis: As someone
who was involved in communist politics and had close relations to the South
African communist party, I could never separate economic liberation from racial
liberation. I imagine racial liberation
as taking place within the context of a redistribution of wealth. I imagined the end of privatization. And that is not what was achieved.
But I’m interested in the
achievements of the South African struggle because things are different. We
cannot discount the struggles and those who gave their lives. It has to mean
something, and it does mean something.
Ainehi Edoro: You have
taken part in many political movements. How has the South African
anti-apartheid/anti-racist movement informed your own theories and practices
around the questions of political struggle?
Angela Davis: My
involvement in the campaign for international solidarity against apartheid
dates back to the 1960s. I was arrested in 1970 by the US Government and
charged with 3 capital crimes. I faced the death penalty 3 times. It was thanks
to an international solidarity movement that I was released.
I’m saying this to point
out that many South Africans joined that campaign. I received numerous
expressions of solidarity from South Africans in exile, from the ANC, the South
African communist party. In the year after my release---I was in jail for about
two years—I visited London and participated in the anti-apartheid rally there.
Not long after that, on August 9th,---the South African Women’s Day--- I went
back to London and spoke at a huge rally.
I can’t imagine my own
trajectory without that constant South African theme. In 1980 when I was
arrested on the campus of UC Berkeley, I was participating in an anti-apartheid
rally. I was also involved in the International Longshore and Workers Warehouse
Union. They were the first to engage in actions that served as a catalyst for
the student anti-apartheid efforts by refusing to unload South African Ships.
What I didn’t have a
chance to say during the session at Qunu---where we shared our experiences
about Nelson Mandela---was that I spoke to Winnie Mandela during the time of
her banning. We rranged a conversation on the telephone. She went to a paid
telephone. I was doing a radio show at that time, so I was able to organize the
show around Winnie Mandela. I later met her and spent some time with her when
she and Mandela were still living together.
Ainehi Edoro: Political
movements tend to constellate around male figures. Think Mandela, Martin Luther
King, Nkruma and so on. Names of women tend not to take on as much force. What
do you think is the place or status of the feminine or the woman in these kinds
political struggles?
Angela Davis: In the
black struggle--- in black radical struggle---women have played an absolutely
pivotal role. The struggle is inconceivable without the participation and the
leadership of women. It’s unfortunate that
the figure of the heroic individual---the masculinist figure of the heroic
individual---almost inevitably erases the people who are most responsible for
the emergence and the development of these struggles. This applies to South
Africa as well. We don’t hear about the women who played absolutely essential
roles. There’s Albertina Sisulu. There’s Ruth First, a white woman whose name
is not evoked nearly enough.
But what about those
whose name we will never know? I’m primarily concerned about how we pay tribute
to those whose names we can never know. How do we acknowledge that, in the US
civil rights movement, it was Black women domestic workers who played the
central role? Most people who are thankful for the civil rights movement never
think about poor black women maids as being the ones who refused to ride the
bus and therefore who were responsible for the success of the Montgomery Bus
Boycott. Women’s role in South Africa is very much the same. Hilda Bernstein’s
book, For Their Triumph and their Tears, comes to mind. It’s a nice book that
records the names of a number of these women.
We have to figure out how
to read the silences of the archives. And certainly women are almost
consistently absent---masses of women who participated in these struggles.
Ainehi Edoro: This year’s
workshop is built around the concept of the “non-racial.” What is your take on
the term? Do you see it has a helpful
way of naming an ideal to which anti-racist struggle, philosophy, practice, or
theory should aspire?
