Angela Davis delivers Steve Biko Memorial Lecture

Davis delivered the 17th Annual Steve Biko Memorial Lecture in Pretoria on Friday.

The lecture commemorated the 39th anniversary of the murder of Black Consciousness leader Stephen Bantu Biko.

According to Davis, it's ironic that two decades after the defeat of Apartheid, violent and militaristic approaches are still being used in South Africa to confront protesters.

In her lecture Angela Davis spoke about what she calls "unfinished activism" propelled by the youth.

"Students have always been at the forefront of radical change and an essential dimension of the learning process is critical thinking. Steve Biko and his comrades led vast numbers of students to raise questions about apartheid and to imagine a different world, even as they clashed with the world as it was," she said.

She applauded learners from Pretoria Girls High for their courage, as well as the Fees Must Fall movement for continuing to fight for free education.

"There are some who say the demand for free education is unrealistic. It's unrealistic because we continue to live with the mandates of capitalism. We continue to think about education as a commodity. Freedom should mean, in the very first place, the freedom of education. The prerequisite for enjoying freedom of education should not be the capacity to pay. Young people are reminding us how retrograde our social priorities have become. They remind us of the world we should be inhabiting," she said. 

Davis says young people are bound to make mistakes, as they did during the Civil Rights Movement, but she believes young people should be allowed the freedom to err.

Speaking of the women's march to the Union Buildings in 1956, Davis said women have also always been at the forefront of progressive activism. 

"The image of that monumental gathering. Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Albertina Sisulu, Fatima Meer, Ruth Mompati, Sophia Williams-De Bruyn and all of the 20 000 women staging a silent protest here in Pretoria in front of the Union Buildings. Now, you have touched the women. You have struck a rock. You have dislodged a boulder. You will be crushed."

Referring to the Black Lives Matter Movement in the US, Davis said the movement is challenging the tyranny of the universal.

"The instance of the particularity of the black predicament is precisely that which is capable of yielding a robust universality. For most of our history, the category human has not embraced black people. Its abstractness has been coloured white and gendered male. If all lives mattered, we would not need to emphatically proclaim that black lives matter"

According to Davis people must not stop dreaming or stop struggling even if capitalism starts crumbling. 

"There will always be vibrant legacies. There will always be unfulfilled promises. There will always be unfinished activisms," she said to loud applause.