Thinking about the young women and girls who led and were a part of the Soweto uprisings today back in 1976 — about the connections between masculinist histories and how the emphasis on cishetero men shapes the contours of struggle and leaves black women deeply vulnerable.

Too much of my own education on the anti-apartheid struggle revolved around the Biko/Sisulu/Sobukwe/Madiba/Tambo/etc. canon, and this too was how our own struggle was memorialized. Women and girls were mere footnotes, sidekicks; that erasure manifests in gendered violence.

We owe so much more to the memories of these women, many of whom still struggle. We owe so much more to their care, labor, and liberatory love than to reinscribe their erasure in our work, to also render the deaths of trans and cis women, trans men, queer folks as afterthoughts.

This is a troll, but the sentiment is far more common than many of you would imagine, whether spoken explicitly or not. Good morning, a luta continua.