Activists Archetypes and the Question of Memory
Many of the women recognized within the black international are considered revolutionaries. For instance, Joy James argues that Assata Shakur was revolutionary because she “became one of the few black female figures in the United States recognized as a leader in an organization that publicly advocated armed self-defense against racist violence.” [1] This act of becoming gestures to a point that black women revolutionaries are made retroactively through the process of remembering. From this, it follows that the archive is orientated toward chronicling the lives of women who are remarkable or individual. As a result, the archive privileges the narratives of “revolutionary” women, while obscuring narratives of “everyday” women.
In Remaking Black Power, Farmer takes a different approach in considering who to be a revolutionary woman. Although the production of history certainly reproduces prejudices about which women are revolutionary, black women radicals often describe themselves in everyday terms. As one female BBP member remarked: “The revolutionary Black woman…She is a worker. She is a mother…She is the strength of the struggle”.[2] This opens up the opportunity to position Ramashamola within the framework of an quotidian woman accomplishing revolutionary work.
During her trial and subsequent campaign for her freedom, Ramashamola was often described as ordinary to suggest her naivety and political unsophistication. International newspapers, feminist organizations, and white religious leaders drew upon Ramashamola’s everyday character to discount her political agency:
Ramashamola…was in no way politically involved at the time of the incident. She was not a high-profile political activist…[The priest] who had known Ramashamola about five months before her arrest - said that although she was not a daily church-goer, Ramashamola is a practicing Catholic in the way that most young people are. Ramashamola was a very ordinary person. She was politically unsophisticated. [3]
While their efforts worked in the end to free Ramashamola and the Sharpeville Six, they nevertheless contributed to notions of Ramashamola’s political vacuity. Furthermore, these claims were rooted in racialized and classed stereotypes about black South African women, working to cast her as an “unlikely martyr” in the struggle against apartheid. [4]
Media representation of Ramashamola similarly relied on stereotypes of religious devoutness to counter claims of Ramashamola’s radicalism. In 1988, The New York Times published an article calling Ramashmola, “a devout Roman Catholic” whose conversation and letters to friends and relatives from prison were “interspersed with biblical quotes and references.”[5] Unbeknownst to white American journalists was the theological underpinnings of the Black Consciousness Movement—South Africa’s iteration of the Black Power Movement. [6] Similarly, the white South African priest who frequented her cell for prayer noted Ramshamola’s noted her piety. While Ramashamola acquiesced to sermons with him, she likely found ways to remind herself of the revolutionary nature of her activism.
In fact, Ramashamola played on widespread ideas about race, gender, and class to garner sympathy from white South Africans and international outlookers. As Ramashamola’s mother and sister made arounds internationally, meeting with heads of state to gather of Ramashamola’s clemency, Ramashamola never mentioned her motivations for entering the protest with the white priest. [7]
She maintained her innocence and it was not until after she was freed that she began to talk about the stakes of that moment for her. M. Bahti Kuumba provides a useful framework for understanding Ramashamola’s negotiation of racialized, gendered, and classed assumptions. Political opportunity structures describe the alignment of societal power and resources that both impede and facilitate social movement emergence and effectiveness. [8] In South Africa, black women have historically capitalized in the cleavages of a highly racialized, gendered, and class-stratified society. [6] For example, during the anti-pass campaigns, black women in domestic service roles were able to galvanize protest and demonstrate freedom of movement which allowed for them to gain political consciousness. Ramashamola similarly makes use of her representation as an everyday woman, while simultaneously redefining the contours of its meaning.
In a similar vein, Pamela E. Brooks claims that there is a subversive nature to black women’s ordinary activism. Despite the negative connotations of the term ordinary, Brooks repurposes the word by insisting that there is something extraordinary about ordinary women. She argues “ordinary, disenfranchised, and seemingly powerless” women can successfully confront powerful states and, in the process, transform their societies. [9] For the most part, they were not well schooled, they did not belong to the social elite, and they often possessed few economic resources. Yet, these women had plenty to say about the source and meaning of the many injustices under which they lived. They communicated their acute dissatisfaction to similarly situated women and men in their communities, persuading them, by example, to put everything on the line for freedom.
Those who knew Ramashamola personally speak to the power of her everyday character. Women like Ramashamola reframe the power of the ordinary, despite not being recognized as political actors. In this way, Ramashamola represents women who practice resistance in ways not immediately recognized, but nevertheless present:
Theresa had been a waitress and had learnt from experience that life could not be lived in compliance, that freedom came from opposition, that it was not a passive state granted by an enlightened government but had always been asserted, and that if there were opposition keeping the forces of tyranny at bay, these would naturally enfold and crush her capacity for spirited independence. Ramashamola was non-aligned to membership of black political parties; her politics came from experience. [10]
Beyond reframing the power of the ordinary, Ramashamola exemplifies the strengthen of everyday resistance. Because of this everyday character, she not reflected within the historical record. In the following section, I describe ways we can begin to theorize incorporating Ramashamola into the historical record and the black international.
[1] James, Joy. "Framing the Panther: Assata Shakur and Black Female Agency." In Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, edited by Gore Dayo F., Theoharis Jeanne, and Woodard Komozi, 138-60. NYU Press, 2009.
[2] Farmer, Ashley D. "The Black Revolutionary Woman, 1966–1975." In Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era, 50-92. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.
[3] Diane Coetzer. "Theresea Ramashamola." Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity, no. 2 (1988): 43-46.
[4] Coetzer, 44.
[5] By JOHN D. BATTERSBY, Special to the New York Times. "Sharpeville Journal; Black and Poor, Her Daughter Faces the Gallows". The New York Times. July 13, 1988, Wednesday, Late City Final Edition.
[6] Fredrickson, George M. Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa. Cary, UNITED STATES: Oxford University Press USA - OSO, 1995.
[7] Alan Hamilton. "Sharpeville families pin last hopes on Thatcher". The Times (London). March 17 1988, Thursday.; Noonan, 214.
[8] Kuumba, M. Bahati. ""You've Struck a Rock": Comparing Gender, Social Movements, and Transformation in the United States and South Africa." Gender and Society 16, no. 4 (2002): 504-23.
[9] Brooks, Pamela E. "Introduction." In Boycotts, Buses, and Passes: Black Women's Resistance in the U.S. South and South Africa, 1-10. University of Massachusetts Press, 2008.
[10] Parker and Mokhesi-Parker, In the Shadow of Sharpeville., 115.