Resistance & Memory: Dulcie September

Africa World Now Project

The way we remember; the forces and institutions that nurture or place barriers on the processes of remembering are not without great contradictions and opportunity. All of which are directly related to the interdependence of legitimacy and consent…the terrain upon which a contestation of power is played out on a daily basis.

Understanding what is at stake in this contestation, is a duty and responsibility. It is science as well as an art. It is real and imaginative.

Mapping and following the continuities in genealogies of phenomenon, mapping the materiality of memory allows us to grasp an understanding of the interconnectedness of power, memory, & resistance.

To be clear the system and structures that prohibit, discourages, and/or award us to move away from mapping memory, to move on, to forget, to leave it in the past…have plans. And those plans have nothing to do with freedom nor liberation.

It is a strategy that uses concepts like race, class, gender citizenship, rights—all essential components to the maintenance of the myth of the nation-state, to distort and create memory.

Nevertheless, in the web of human history, the most articulate expression of a people’s humanity is found in the way they resist…the most vibrant platform that allow visions of the future to connect with now moments.

Just as the complexity and vast scope of oppression finds an expansive terrain to evolve with the suppression and distortion of memory, so too is the complexity and vastness of a peoples resist to it.

Accordingly, there are stories and necessary continuities that we must identify and once identified, we must map. We must create a platform to construct memory, not for the sake of remembering. But organized to understand where in the long processes of resisting sociopolitical and economic inequities inherent to the current global social order can we follow to their logical conclusions.

Today, we will present a conversation that AWNP’s Mwiza Munthali had with filmmaker Enver Samuel, director of Murder in Paris, which tells the story of Dulcie September.

Image: https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/dulcie-evonne-september

Film/Take Action: https://murderinparis.com/home

The Erasure of Dulcie September - https://africasacountry.com/2019/08/the-erasure-of-dulcie-september