Angela Davis in Auckland

There hadn't been much publicity, but forty-five minutes before start time, there were already forty or so people in the lobby of the Maidment Theatre. I decided to stay and make sure I got a good seat, instead of wandering off for a drink at the "Front Bench".

John M. showed several of his friends a slide show of photos from a Polynesian Panther demo in Auckland in 1972(?). There was a picture of Albert Wendt sitting in the Panthers' office with a poster of Angela Davis on the wall behind him. It was a pity that the slides could not be shown before the lecture.

Joe Te Rito welcomed Davis in Maori. Linda Smith from the Education Faculty at Auckland U gave a disappointing introduction, emphasizing only Davis' hair achievements and saying she looked "extremely young" in the posters. Davis winced as graciously as she could. I whispered to a friend that I had seldom heard a less sensitive welcome.


Smith might have said that Davis looked even better than thirty five years ago. She had the beauty of a life well lived, lithe and assured.

I had known nothing of her since the days of her fame, when she had survived imprisonment on several capital charges. I was unconsciously apprehensive that she might have retreated into born again, academic obscurantism, or perhaps some kind of battered acquiescence in the powers that should not be. My fears were unfounded.

She spoke eloquently of the similarities and contrasts between her life and Condaleeza Rice's. While Rice sees her life as the triumph of an individual over racism, Davis sees her own life as one linked to her community. There could be no individual salvation apart from that community.

The theme of her talk was the politically oppressive nature of the system of imprisonment in the U.S. and, by extension, in New Zealand. She argued that imprisonment was the reflection of institutional racism and that being black was as much a factor as being a criminal in determining one's chances of ending up behind bars.

It was a bracing change to hear such a radical and eloquent indictment of the use of prison as a response to crime. Prison was a kind of rubbish bin where those who had no role in the age of the "globalisation of capital" and "de-industrialisation" could be kept out of sight.

In New Zealand, few attack imprisonment and there is little to counter the fear and revenge based arguments of pro-prison pressure groups like the Sensible Sentencing Trust. There is little questioning of the appalling statistic that NZ is second only to the US in the rate of imprisonment.

Davis saluted Syd Jackson, one of the founders of Nga Tamatoa, the defining group of modern Maori radicalism. Syd was in the audience.


Davis spoke eloquently, reminding me of the tradition of speaking that she shared with so many black American leaders, including Martin Luther King, who worked in her home town, Birmingham, Alabama. She listened as she spoke and was able to keep in touch with her audience in spite of her jet lag and her unfamiliarity with Aotearoa/NZ.