TW: Today marks the sixth anniversary of the assassination of Marielle Franco (1979-2018), the Afro-Brazilian politician who, along with her driver, Anderson Pedro Gomes, was killed in Rio de Janeiro while returning from a meeting titled, “Young Black Women Moving [Power] Structures.”

In 2016, Franco ran for a seat on the Rio de Janeiro city council. As a Black woman and single mother from the favelas, she positioned herself as a representative and defender of poor Black women and people from the favelas. She was one of the 51 representatives elected, receiving the fifth-highest vote total out of more than 1,500 candidates.

Marielle’s murder took place exactly nine months after I left the UK for Ghana, which was three days after the Grenfell Fire and just over a year after the Brexit referendum in which Britain decided to leave the EU, a place (and institution) I had been working in/with since 2010. As I sat in my new library in Accra, the confluence of all these events reminded me in a startling way that no matter how far you try to escape from “home,” whatever that constitutes, it is always calling you back in one way or another – physically, mentally, emotionally.

Events in the UK this week are yet another reminder that, for those of us whose identities straddle borders and can’t be constrained in tiny boxes, our position is always tenuous and, worse still, always under varying degrees of threat. The anniversary of the slaying of Marielle Franco is a grim and timely warning of what the thoughts and words of those with power can ultimately lead to if we don’t confront what we know to be true and call it out for what it is.

When we moved the Library Of Africa and The African Diaspora (LOATAD) to a new building at the end of 2019, there was no doubt that we would name one of our two walkways after Marielle Franco, a woman whose life was tragically cut short for seeking to represent the interests of society’s most vulnerable people – her people, my people, our people.  

Rest in Power, Marielle Franco. A luta continua.

#MariellePresente

Image: Marielle Franco Way at the Library Of Africa and The African Diaspora (LOATAD), March 2020. By Seth Avusuglo.