MINDS BEHIND MOVEMENTS
Be it Martin Luther King Jr or Nelson Mandela, their fervent speeches were always accompanied by an author’s backing
The calls for protests and revolutions by prominent figures of history might have resulted in propelling numerous movements towards success. But time and again, these leaders are accompanied by their linchpins whose ideas and writings form the texts to base the study of these movements in times to come.
CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT — JAMES BALDWIN
Born in 1924 to a single mother, Baldwin never knew the identity of his father. He, along with Martin Luther King Jr and Malcom X, formed the core of the American Civil Rights Movement. Baldwin spent a considerable about of time in France during his formative years and when he returned to America in 1957, the movement was at its peak. A photograph of Dorothy Counts, a young girl trying to enter a school while her colleagues — all whites — abuse and ridicule her, impacted him enormously. His editor asked him to report the incident, which was when he met Martin Luther King Jr. His experiences formed the base of his work — No One Knows My Name. Baldwin was disgusted by the pace at which the movement was gathering momentum. “Many have given up,” he wrote in it, adding, “They stay home and watch the TV screen, living on the earnings of their parents, cousins, bothers, or uncles, and only leave the house to go to the movies or to the nearest bar. How’re you making it?”
Baldwin, then met Malcolm X. A prominent human rights activist. The towering figures had impassioned debates but got along really well.
“Mr. Baldwin says, the man here who calls himself a Negro, is an ex-slave. If he is an exslave — I’d rather say he’s still a slave, but he’s wearing his slavemaster’s name, the name that was given to him during slavery,” Malcolm said, during a heated on-air debate with Baldwin. To which Baldwin replied, “I would be a very different person if I were not the descendant of a slave. In fact, I am the descendant of a slave, and this is one of the things that I have to deal with, because it is true. And I don’t think that it has to be a badge of shame.”
Baldwin, after the success of the Civil Rights Movement would live to see both his partners assassinated. His final work, Remember This House, of which he’d be able to pen only 30 pages before succumbing to stomach cancer is an account of his reflections of his journey. He wrote of his journey, “To accept one’s past — one’s history — is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.”
APARTHEID — NADINE GORDIMER
A 1991 Nobel Prize Winner, Nadine Gordimer was at the forefront of the Apartheid movement alongside Nelson Mandela. Throughout her career, she penned 15 novels, most of which fused political turmoil which peeked over personal struggles of South African blacks, to paint a vivid portrait of injustice. Her Jewish father himself lived under oppression in Lithuania, which some believe, got her interested in political pursuits. “What is the purpose of writing? For me, personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are, while there’s another force from inside battling to make us something else,” she wrote.
Gordimer, in fact, was responsible for advising Nelson Mandela on his famous speech — I Am Prepared to Die. The very speech that got him imprisoned for life. What got her noticed was her first book, The Lying Days. The story of a young white woman in South Africa, who becomes politically aware as she grows up, which many call a semiautobiographical novel.
But it was her work, J ly’s People, that set the ball rolling in her favour.
The phrase, showing a mirror to the society, perhaps, was never personified the way it was in her book. In the novel, she imagines a fictional civil war, where it is in fact the whites who’re oppressed by the blacks. Through her work she was able to show the country the plight of the blacks in South Africa with the race inversed.
“White people must have their own people somewhere. Aren’t they living everywhere in the world…Don’t they go anywhere they want to go? They’ve got money,” says one character to the other, a thought usually thrown at the oppressed black community in the African nation..