Imagined Connections and an Expansive Black International Vision
In this section, I will analyze how Theresa Ramashamola and the Sharpeville Six surface within African-American, mainstream U.S., and international newspapers and what this indicates about the global reverberations of their imprisonment. Furthermore, I will evaluate what implications this has for how the black international is theorized. As I noted in a previous section, Ramashamola reminds us what is lost when we do not incorporate the voices of women of the third world within the archive. I will delve into why Ramashamola should be placed alongside other major actors within the black international, such as Ericka Huggins, Louise Thompson Patterson and Claudia Jones.[1]
Scholars of the black international have characterized the existence of wide political international networks primarily through direct connections such as migrations, public speaking, journalism, and overseas travel of activists. This emphasis on direct connections not only preclude class structures that inhibited everyday Black South Africans from building transnational networks, but they also limit theorizing about the ways that imaginary links may have materialized. Imaginary, in this instance, does not mean illusory, but rather, speaks to how African-Americans tied themselves to the struggles of South African activists without direct exchange. The imaginary connections that materialized between African-Americans and the Sharpeville Six alludes to an expansive vision of a black international that incorporates many connections between Blacks across the globe.
In the summer of 1988, as the Sharpeville Six were preparing for the appeal of their death sentence, African Americans looked on in dismay, for the Sharpeville Six represented something all too familiar. The Harlem-based Amsterdam News reported on a local protest bringing awareness to poverty, drug-smuggling, police brutality, and racism within the school system. Among the demands was “to draw further attention to the continued imprisonment in racist South Africa of Nelson Mandela…and the imminent execution by hanging in that country of the ‘Sharpeville Six’”[7]. In the ensuing months, several mainstream and African-American newspapers published articles about the Six, many of them drawing direct connections between local struggles in the United States and those in South Africa.
The Sharpeville Six’s story had global resonances that brought the brutality of the South African apartheid regime to the forefront of global consciousness. Publications in India, China, and the United Kingdom all looked on in horror as the apartheid regime punished political dissidents. As one Australian newspaper wrote:
Scholars of the black international have characterized the existence of wide political international networks primarily through direct connections such as migrations, public speaking, journalism, and overseas travel of activists. This emphasis on direct connections not only preclude class structures that inhibited everyday Black South Africans from building transnational networks, but they also limit theorizing about the ways that imaginary links may have materialized. Imaginary, in this instance, does not mean illusory, but rather, speaks to how African-Americans tied themselves to the struggles of South African activists without direct exchange. The imaginary connections that materialized between African-Americans and the Sharpeville Six alludes to an expansive vision of a black international that incorporates many connections between Blacks across the globe.
In the summer of 1988, as the Sharpeville Six were preparing for the appeal of their death sentence, African Americans looked on in dismay, for the Sharpeville Six represented something all too familiar. The Harlem-based Amsterdam News reported on a local protest bringing awareness to poverty, drug-smuggling, police brutality, and racism within the school system. Among the demands was “to draw further attention to the continued imprisonment in racist South Africa of Nelson Mandela…and the imminent execution by hanging in that country of the ‘Sharpeville Six’”[7]. In the ensuing months, several mainstream and African-American newspapers published articles about the Six, many of them drawing direct connections between local struggles in the United States and those in South Africa.
The Sharpeville Six’s story had global resonances that brought the brutality of the South African apartheid regime to the forefront of global consciousness. Publications in India, China, and the United Kingdom all looked on in horror as the apartheid regime punished political dissidents. As one Australian newspaper wrote:
Now the "Sharpeville Six" seem doomed to play out their part in South Africa's history of horror...That is why there is global revulsion at this travesty of justice which sets a new low even for South Africa, and over which Australia has rightly protested. When...former waitress Theresa Ramashamola and the other ordinary faces in a crowd die on the gallows, the human dream of justice will have died one more death with them. Once again, the name of "Sharpeville" bares the soul of a nation without freedom, democracy or the common sanctuary of law. [2]
However, black newspapers drew links between what was going on in South Africa and what was going on in the United States. The Virginia-based New Journal and Guide published a letter to the editor calling Black South Africans “Black brothers and sisters under oppression.”[5]
Another article in the same newspaper counted the Sharpeville Six’s reprieve as a victory: “Blacks on death row in American and South Africa won one and lost one, recently,”[6] The Amsterdam News published an article saying an upcoming celebration in New York City would “also be ‘a [MOU6] manifestation of solidarity with the Sharpeville Six.’”[8] African-Americans protested the visit of the Consul General of South Africa’s public relations tour in Detroit. Instead, the demonstrators marched in front of their meeting place with signs that read “Free the Sharpeville Six.”[3]
Other African-American newspapers were more biting in their disavowal of the Reagan Administration and its connection with the South African apartheid regime. The Amsterdam News reported that the Young Socialist Alliance, the youth section of the Socialist Workers Party, invited a representative from the African National Congress to the United States to help “sensitize the American people so as to enhance the isolation of the racist South African regime.”[4] The representative stressed the importance of Reagan’s collusion with P.W. Botha, the prime minster during apartheid: “Now as Botha oppresses the Africans, Reagan embraces him as an ally.”[5] Also, the representative made accusations about the number of American companies in South Africa undergirding the apartheid system, calling on the American people to impose their own sanctions by providing fundamental support to the South African freedom struggle. Citing the case of the Sharpeville Six, and mentioning Ramashamola by name, the representative urged “Americans to do more to save their lives.”[6] Their comrades in South Africa were imprisoned for “resisting [the] [MOU7] fascist and racist system of apartheid and fighting for a future in which all South Africans are free and equal.”[7] Aware of how international pressure could sway South African courts toward clemency, the representative implored African-Americans to “use your influence” to “urge the South African government to commute the death sentences and abide by international norms that would declare these youth to be political prisoners.” [8]
While Ramashamola appears briefly and infrequently throughout the historical record, her impressions are heard across national and continental boundaries. Yet, existing frameworks for theorizing transnational linkages do not account for how connections made across the black international are not always direct, but nevertheless determined by one another. [MOU8] In short, while the silences of Ramashamola’s story suggest that it is not easy to place her within the context of the black international her impressions illuminate that transnational links can exist in indirect forms. As Michael O. West and William G. Martin describe, the black international is made up of “loose, informal connections” which reveals “how local struggles intersected with one another across diverse boundaries to form, loosely and informally, a black international that was greater than the sum total of its constituent parts.”
Relocating Ramashamola to the black international recovers the voices of nameless, everyday women who made up the multitude of black liberation movements. Although Ramashamola herself may not have a written record asserting a black international, we must do the work to place her within a context of global emancipation for African-descended people. This practice recognizes a collective imagination that produces a vision that enables African-descended people to see beyond immediate ordeals.[9] Also, this practice is attentive to why these direct connections may have not materialized within the historical record.
Ramashamola and the Sharpeville Six inspired blacks elsewhere to make cases against global white supremacy through imagined links. Still, the problem of recovery lies in the methods for accounting for transnational linkages that rely on written records. This point is taken up in the following section on the search for the black women’s postcolonial archive. What would an archive that is responsive to how the compounding dynamics of geography, race, and gender confound voices look like? In what follows, I show why this question is imperative for the field of Black Women’s Studies because of its set of principles concerning silenced histories.
[1] Yuri Kochiyama, Ericka Huggins & Mary Uyematsu Kao (2009) “Stirrin’ Waters” ‘n Buildin’ Bridges: A Conversation with Ericka Huggins and Yuri Kochiyama, Amerasia Journal, 35:1, 140-167.; Boyce Davies, Carole. 2008. Left of Karl Marx. [Electronic Resource] : The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones. E-Duke Books Scholarly Collection. Duke University Press.; McDuffie, Erik S. Sojourning for Freedom : Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism. Duke University Press, 2011.
[2] "A Small Sharpeville Hanging". Herald. March 17, 1988 Thursday.
[3] Jones, Allison. 1988. "Protest South African public relations tour of Detroit." Michigan Citizen (1988-1989), Apr 30.
[4] Staff, Simon Anekwe Amsterdam News. “ANC Youth Rep on Tour Here to Expose Reagan-Botha Link.” New York Amsterdam News (1962-1993); New York, N.Y. New York, N.Y., United States, New York, N.Y., April 23, 1988.
[5] Amsterdam News. “ANC Youth Rep”
[6] Amsterdam News. “ANC Youth Rep”
[7] Amsterdam News. “ANC Youth Rep”
[8] Amsterdam News. “ANC Youth Rep”
[9] Kelley, Robin D. G. 2002. Freedom Dreams : The Black Radical Imagination. Beacon Press.