Assata Shakur, the Black Liberation Army activist whose defiant spirit made her a global icon of resistance, has died in Havana at the age of 78. For more than four decades, she lived in exile in Cuba, a land that offered her sanctuary just as it did for freedom fighters from Southern Africa. Her passing closes a remarkable life lived on the frontlines of struggle, a life that resonates profoundly with Africans who endured and resisted colonialism and apartheid.
Born JoAnne Deborah Byron in New York in July 1947, Assata came of age in a nation that proclaimed democracy but practised racial exclusion. From Harlem to Wilmington, North Carolina, she witnessed firsthand the inequities of race and class. As a student, she embraced activism, joining the Black Panther Party, where she worked on community-based projects that provided food, education, and healthcare for Black Americans denied dignity by the state. When state repression intensified under the FBI’s COINTELPRO programme, she gravitated toward the Black Liberation Army, a more militant formation that took inspiration from African liberation wars, from Zimbabwe’s bush struggle to Mozambique’s guerrilla fronts. It was here that Assata’s belief deepened: freedom was not given, it had to be seized.
In 1973, a confrontation on the New Jersey Turnpike left state trooper Werner Foerster and her comrade Zayd Malik Shakur dead, and Assata gravely injured. Convicted in 1977 in a trial she denounced as racially biased, she was sentenced to life imprisonment. But in 1979, she escaped prison in an audacious act that electrified supporters and horrified the state. By 1984, she had reappeared in Cuba, welcomed by Fidel Castro, whose government had long been a steadfast ally of African liberation. In Havana, she found refuge not as a fugitive but as a political exile, sharing in the same solidarity that had sustained movements such as the ANC, SWAPO, ZANU and FRELIMO, whose fighters trained and recuperated in Cuba during the long wars against apartheid and colonialism.
In Cuba, Assata became not only a mother to her daughter, Kakuya, but also a mentor to countless visitors from the African diaspora. Her autobiography, Assata (1987), became a classic of liberation literature, chronicling her childhood, activism, imprisonment, and exile in language both lyrical and unflinching. Like Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like, her words remain a manifesto for dignity and self-determination. While the FBI branded her a “Most Wanted Terrorist,” artists and movements transformed her into a cultural icon. Public Enemy, Tupac Shakur, and Common immortalised her in song, ensuring her story reached a new generation. For the oppressed across Africa and the diaspora, her name stood alongside Harriet Tubman, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Amílcar Cabral, and Chris Hani—figures who insisted that liberation was non-negotiable.
To Southern Africa, Assata’s life in exile was profoundly familiar. Just as she fled America’s prisons, so too did African activists escape detention and persecution, finding refuge in foreign lands that supported their cause. From Lusaka to Maputo, from Dar es Salaam to Luanda, exiled activists rebuilt lives while keeping the dream of freedom alive. Cuba itself, which sheltered Assata, had dispatched soldiers to Angola and medical brigades to Mozambique and South Africa, affirming its role in the global anti-colonial struggle. For many Africans, Assata became part of that shared fraternity of struggle: an exile whose personal sacrifice mirrored their own histories, whose survival in Havana symbolised the interconnectedness of Black liberation.
Her death in Havana, from unspecified health conditions and advanced age, was announced by Cuban authorities. She is survived by her daughter, Kakuya Shakur, who carries forward her legacy. Yet Assata Shakur will not be remembered as one silenced by exile, but as one who gave voice to resistance. In her own words: “I have been locked by the lawless. Handcuffed by the haters. Gagged by the greedy. And, if I know anything at all, it’s that a wall is just a wall, and nothing more at all. It can be broken down.”
From Harlem to Havana, Soweto to Salisbury, Brixton to Bamako, her name continues to resound as a song of defiance. She was not merely a woman who lived, but a woman who dared, whose daring inspires us still. Assata Shakur will be remembered not as a fugitive, nor as the label imposed upon her by her enemies, but as a freedom fighter of unyielding spirit—a daughter of Africa, though born in America, who kept alive the flame of liberation for generations yet to come.
