Calling for justice for anti-apartheid activist Dulcie September: un-erasing life stories of African assassinated activists to develop a powerful poetics for collective liberation

By: Leonard Cortana; Ph.D. Candidate in Cinema Studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts; Recipient, United Nations Human Rights Fellowship program for people of African descent; NYU Africa House Thoyer Fellowship Award

On March 29th, 1988, a South African anti-apartheid activist and ANC representative in France, Dulcie September, was assassinated outside the ANC's Paris office. She was 53 at the time of her assassination. Thirty-three years after the execution, French lawyer Yves Laurin, acting on behalf of Dulcie September's family and relatives, petitioned the cold case re-opening. Excerpts of the documentary, Murder in Paris, produced and directed by South African filmmaker Enver Samuel will be submitted as evidence in support of the case. The first hearings will happen in November 2022.

According to the Human Rights Defenders' annual report, an activist is murdered daily, often with complete impunity. In the last few years, Afrodescent and Indigenous social leaders defending their lands have been the first victims, and their number has increased over the last years. The African continent has also been the stage of many executions that mainstream media in Europe and the US have covered very little.

In the midst of years of intense mobilization from grassroots social movements and the resurgence of an illiberal populism that seeks to ban critical race theory, we risk seeing more attempts to erase African and afro-descent activists' stories. The African and Black diaspora and their allies have used media, particularly digital platforms, to un-erase these stories and call for justice. During the pandemic, many films and advocacy videos have focused their narratives on the life stories of executed activists to discuss the history of social movements and decolonization processes. Many filmmakers, such as Enver Samuel, collaborate with lawyers to create advocacy films that complement and even replace the archives often kept secret decades after the assassination.

In my research, I unravel the collaboration between filmmakers and activists to document these movements and memorialize these figures of resistance. Their life stories and fight travel the continents and reveal similar contemporary patterns in various local contexts. My aim is not only to identify the transnational translators but to use it as a pedagogic methodology to teach students that their role is to be part of these dynamics of historical un-erasures.

Post-apartheid South Africa faces many challenges decades after the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. Many assassination cases remain unresolved, and women activist legacies are to be celebrated. With my students, we created the podcast project Dulcie Lives On when they participated in the un-erasure campaign, reflecting on her legacy through their perspectives based in the US. In this way, scholars and professors can experiment with methodologies to answer students' queries and expand the corpus of figures celebrated in history books. With the NYU School of Professional Studies and the NYU Africa House, we organized an online panel discussion to discuss September's story and the challenge of working without archives, still close to the public. I organize a similar event with the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University, focusing on the role of digital archives in litigation processes and a reflection on the legacy of Black activism in South Africa with the University of California Santa Barbara.

Dulcie September's tireless fight against the apartheid regime is a fantastic example. Justice will be given both in the courts and the History books.

I have been selected to be part of the 2022 Fellowship program cohort for people of African descent at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva. I will encourage them to shape policies that look closer at the role of media makers and civil society; our mission is to protect the ones who speak the truth to power and develop a powerful poetics for collective liberation.

#MerciDulcie