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In 1921, the Consolidated Diamond Mines of South-West Africa, founded by Ernest Oppenheimer sent Honnold off to what would later be Namibia to scout for diamonds. The library at Pomona College was named after William L Honnold, who made his money in South Africa from the colonial mining industry (as I found out many years later from Archie’s student, John Higginson, who had previously taught at Pomona and ran afoul of the administration because of his investigation into Honnold’s past in southern Africa). The Claremont library had none of Archie’s books, which was not a surprise. That was the reason why I had taken classes with Sid Lemelle on African history, it was why I was involved with the organisation of the pan-African conference, and it was why Vincent Harding told me about Archie.Ĭirca 1921: Namibian Diamond Fields, William L Honnold papers. These were my early commitments against occupation and for liberation that remain as strong now as they were then. My dorm room in college was spartan except for two poorly produced posters: one a stencil of the iconic picture of Hector Pieterson being carried by Mbuyisa Makhubo in Soweto (June 1976) and the other a Palestinian Liberation Organization poster of a house with the shadow of an Israeli soldier against blood pouring through the door to depict the atrocity of Sabra and Shatila (1982). It was hard to be on a college campus in the United States during the 1980s and be indifferent to three kinds of struggles: the emergence of multiculturalism, the harsh wars of Central America driven by the United States government, and the struggles of the southern African people for liberation. But why was Vincent Harding talking to me about Archie?Ĭirca 1986: Students for South African Awareness, Pomona College, California.
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Many of the papers did not yet make sense to me, but conversations at the tea break with Maryse Conde, Paul Gilroy, Robin Kelley, Cedric Robinson, Ann Seidman, Ntongela Masilela, and members of the African National Congress (ANC) and the South-West Africa People’s Organisation (Swapo) stirred in me a great desire to swim in that river of struggle. That conference helped shape most of my intellectual world. Harding was in Claremont to speak at a conference my teachers Sid Lemelle and Ruthie Gilmore had organised on pan-Africanism. The previous year, I had read Harding’s remarkable book There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (1981), a book that caught the sway of the movement, the ‘black river of struggle’. A veteran civil rights activist, Harding had worked closely with Martin Luther King, Jr., including authoring King’s key anti-war speech, ‘A Time to Break the Silence’. ‘You need to read Archie’, Vincent Harding told me one sunny day in 1988 in Claremont, California.