“A fearless, courageous and completely dedicated woman who supported freedom in South Africa.” That is how a close friend and colleague described anti-apartheid and social justice activist Jennifer Davis who died in the United States last week.
Regarded as a leader of the anti-apartheid movement in the United States, Davis was honoured with The Order of the Companions of O.R. Tambo in Bronze in 2009 for her contribution to the anti-apartheid struggle, the field of education and commitment to human rights.
Davis has been described as a relentless fighter against injustice throughout her life. A student activist through the 50s and 60s and the subsequent pressure that forced her into exile in the US in 1966 where she dedicated her life to the struggle.
Her friend and colleague Donna Katzin, who is the Executive Director of Shared Interest says she worked with Davis right up until her passing on October 15.
Katzin says “I first knew her as an activist, she was heading the American Committee on Africa, the oldest anti-apartheid organisation in the United States which she ran for close to 20 years and worked at before but she was fearless. She would help design campaigns and mobilize a staff with very little pay and very little time and a massive movement of volunteers and people who were in the streets on these campaigns over time.”
The American Committee on Africa, which Davis led as Executive Director from 1981 until 2000, afforded Davis a platform through which to strengthen ties with liberation organisations on the continent while galvanizing support here against the Apartheid regime through speaking engagements from college campuses to congress.
Katzin says, “To get the comprehensive anti-Apartheid Act passed in 1985, before that which synchronized with the movements in the streets in South Africa and the defiance campaign, at the same time she was building a movement here that paralleled the protest movements in South Africa and she and other organisations that she helped to bring together, so I was working with the interfaith centre on corporate responsibility. There was TransAfrica, there was Washington Office on Africa, many activists organisations that brought people out from congregations, from campuses, from communities themselves that came out to oppose apartheid.”
She was part of the organizing committee that would plan the first visit to the United States by former President Nelson Mandela soon after his release from prison in 1990.
Katzin says, “I was on that committee as well and she played a wonderful roll particularly in not only bringing the groups that she had helped organize before and that American Committee on Africa had helped organize but also the cultural community because she had helped through ACPOA bring together the album, I ain’t gonna play in Sun City and it was that Sun City Album that brought out musical luminaries to capture people’s imagination and attention and also the slogan that came out of that was keep the pressure on and we did.”
While volunteering at a Mandela Day clean up in central park in 2011 Davis said, “It’s enormously important to remember what his contribution to SA and the world was, he was a freedom fighter and by that I really mean he meant to change society. Things to remember are the courage, the determination to keep on working, the ability to look at people and recognize that they can change and they may change, but never to move off your fundamental principles, he was an extraordinarily principled man.”
Davis recognised that even with democracy in 1994, that economic justice was still a long way off for the majority of South Africans.
She says, “People need to remember that she was courageous, that she was humble, that she was tremendously visionary, and not only visionary in the big sense of being able to say that Apartheid was a system of white power and black poverty. That struggle continues and she was someone who planted in us the seed to carry it forward to understand that even though we may not live to see total victory that we will continue and pass it on.”
Davis who was honoured with a National Order in 2009 for her diligent service to South Africa is survived by her partner, two children and five grandchildren.
Donations in her name can be made to the ‘Shared Interest Jennifer Davis Fund for the Future’ which mobilises resources for Southern Africa’s economically disenfranchised communities, or to the African Activist Archive. Jennifer Davis was 85.
