EIn 1974, Angela Davis, 30, published her autobiography. René Mabanckou, uncle of the future writer, had placed the book in a prominent place in his library in Pointe-Noire (Congo). From the age of 9, little Alain looked fascinated at the Afro cut of the Black Panther activist: “You were my distant mother.” He did not yet know that much later he would join this America where it is not good to be a communist, he who recalls that, in the independent Congo where he grew up, “Marxist-Leninist ideology […] had become [le] daily bread”.
In speaking to Angela Davis, Mabanckou does not avoid any of the current issues that electrify politics and campuses – racism, police brutality, cultural appropriation. “This woman who looks at us” does not therefore only look at the audience that Angela Davis addressed on May 8, 2014, at the University of California where Mabanckou teaches. Here he takes up the major themes of this meeting, deciphers the currents of the movements for civil rights, radical and moderate, recalls the time of Jim Crow laws, the origin of the blackface and the highlights of the activist’s career: “You then took the lead of the movement in support of the brothers of Soledad. Your word was authorized, your emblematic figure, you were listened to.”
“Uncle René’s” library
Halfway between his Tomorrow I will be 20 years old (Gallimard, 2010) and its Black letters (Fayard, 2016), inaugural lectures given at the Collè […] Read more
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