When Culture Stops Carrying Memory, Movements Keep Starting Over

Movements do not become durable through urgency alone. They need culture to carry urgency into memory, meaning, and practice. That is the line I keep coming back to.

Urgency is everywhere right now. Every week brings another ruling, another law, another backlash, another video, another election panic, another reason to gather people and say, “No, seriously, this matters.” And it does matter. The urgency is real.

But urgency leaks.

People get tired. The news cycle moves on. The meeting ends. The rally disperses. The press release gets posted, skimmed, and buried under twelve other emergencies. This is not because people do not care. It is because movements cannot live on reaction alone. They need ways to remember between emergencies. They need songs, stories, plays, rituals, images, films, and performances that help the meaning outlive the moment.

When culture stops carrying memory, movements keep starting over.

I am writing this partly through a South African lens. Not as autobiography, but because I grew up close enough to the South African freedom struggle to know this in my bones: music and theatre were not side dishes. They were not the “arts moment” before the serious people came back to the microphone. They were part of the struggle itself.

I wonder, now, why so much justice work in America seems to treat the performing arts as an optional extra.

It feels like a mistake. Not a small one.

What culture does that politics cannot do on its own

Political work often has to simplify. It needs a demand. It needs a message. It needs a vote. It needs a headline. It needs a clean line people can repeat. That is necessary. I am not against slogans. A good slogan can do a lot of work.

But slogans are not enough, because human beings are not simple. Justice issues are layered. They are not just about one bad law, one bad ruling, one bad leader, or one bad institution. They are about history, fear, power, economics, religion, propaganda, family stories, social pressure, identity, belonging, resentment, grief, and hope.

You cannot reach all of that with a press release.

A speech can explain the issue. A song can make people feel why it matters. A play can help them recognize themselves inside it.

Theatre can get into the psyche. Storytelling can show the complicated streams of thought inside a person. It can show how propaganda works, how fear becomes normal, how people justify things, and how even people trying to do good can become confused, compromised, afraid, proud, wounded, or stuck. That matters. If we want activism that actually transforms people, we cannot only shout the right conclusions. We have to reach the nerve endings where the conscience wakes up.

Music does another kind of work. Music can soften people without weakening them. It can comfort the disheartened and embolden the courageous. Some people are barely hanging on. They need comfort. Some people are ready to act. They need courage. Most of us are somewhere between the two, depending on the day, the court ruling, the bank balance, and how much sleep we got.

Music can meet people along that whole continuum. It can help people face tomorrow. And movements need that, because justice work is not one brave moment. It is Monday morning. It is the next meeting. It is the next defeat. It is the next funeral. It is the next court decision. It is the next time you have to explain to people why this still matters.

Rallies need more than speeches

I have been thinking about political rallies, and I want to say this carefully because I have deep respect for the people who organize them. Pulling people together in public is not easy. It takes courage, permits, trust, relationships, sound systems, volunteers, security, speakers, timing, and a thousand small details nobody sees. In urgent moments, rallies give people a place to stand together and say, “We are here. We are paying attention. This matters.”

That matters.

And most of the time, the format makes sense. There are many groups to honor, many leaders who need to be heard, and many messages that need to be carried. So the structure becomes familiar: one person speaks for a few minutes, then another, then another, then another. Each person may be wonderful. The cause may be urgent. The speeches may all be true.

But after a while, even committed people start to fade a little. The human brain can only absorb so much spoken urgency at once.

That is not a criticism. It is just how people are made. We need more than information. We need breath. We need rhythm. We need shared feeling. We need a way to take in what we are hearing so it does not just pile up as more outrage, more grief, more instruction, more weight.

A well-placed song can change the atmosphere in two minutes. It can gather the room. It can break through fatigue. It can give people a shared breath. It can make grief feel less lonely. It can make courage feel possible.

There is a role for communal singing — people singing together, not just watching someone else perform. That has always mattered. People sing themselves into courage. They sing themselves into belonging. Martin Luther King Jr. understood this clearly. During the Albany Movement, he said freedom songs were playing “a strong and vital role” in the struggle, giving people “new courage and a sense of unity” and keeping hope alive during the hardest hours.

Bernice Johnson Reagon, who founded Sweet Honey in the Rock, spent her life thinking about this. She understood that singing together was not just a warm-up before the serious work began. It was part of the work. It reached people in the body, in the breath, in the feeling level. It changed the room, and it changed the people in the room.

But there is also another kind of song: the crafted song, the song that lands like an arrow, the song that pierces the heart, the song that says what the room has been feeling but could not yet say. That kind of song is not just a nice addition to a rally. It can deepen what the rally becomes.

Still, the case is bigger than rallies. Music and theatre belong in the whole ecology of public life: schools, universities, churches, community centers, festivals, theatres, classrooms, conferences, concerts, films, recordings, public rituals, and the everyday places where people learn what to remember and what to care about.

The goal is not simply to give a few artists a bigger platform. The bigger win is when art shaped by justice begins to travel. A song spreads into Sunday morning church services. A theatre company stages a play, and then it makes its way through high schools and community groups. A college class studies it. A choir sings it. A youth group takes it up. A filmmaker references it. A local artist responds to it.

When a movement gains a cultural life, something starts to happen.

Apartheid South Africa did not just have protest songs. It had a protest culture.

This is where South Africa matters for me — not just as something I have studied from a distance, but as something I lived close enough to feel in my bones.

The South African freedom struggle was not carried only by speeches, meetings, strategies, and political pressure. It was carried by a whole atmosphere. There were freedom songs, township theatre, jazz, choral music, exile recordings, church songs, coded lyrics, dance, comedy, satire, popular performance, plays, and musicals moving through the country and out into the world. The culture was not sitting politely on the edge of the struggle, waiting to be invited in. It was already inside it.

In September 1988, the apartheid government banned several songs from the music project I had pioneered — a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual band built at the intersection of worship and the justice movement. We were not alone. That same week, songs by Johnny Clegg’s Savuka and PJ Powers were also banned. They were among the country’s most visible musical challengers of apartheid’s racial imagination — artists making music across the divide at a time when the state needed that divide to hold.

That kind of ban tells you something. It means the music was doing something the system needed to stop.

Suddenly we were under surveillance. Many of the white parents who had been letting their kids come to our shows started keeping them away. Everything went onto high alert. It was uncomfortable, obviously. But it was also, in a strange way, confirmation. If the songs were harmless, nobody would have bothered banning them.

But the songs leaked through anyway. The state could block a radio broadcast. It could not stop music from traveling through cassettes, live performance, word of mouth, and the underground.

Then, in February 1990, the government unbanned the liberation movements and began releasing political prisoners. The cultural weather changed almost overnight. The same broadcasting corporation that had kept our songs off the air gave us a half-hour TV special — broadcast, as I remember it, on a Sunday between the Wimbledon men’s final and the World Cup soccer final.

That showcase became the closing of a chapter. We had been a protest band, and our particular work was done for that season. The country was not healed. The work of justice was not finished. But the season had shifted. The specific protest we had been carrying was no longer needed in the same way. What had once needed to travel underground could now stand, briefly and visibly, in the open.

The state tried to silence the music. The music outlasted the state.

That is the point I do not want us to miss. Culture was not a side dish to the struggle. It was one of the ways the struggle kept breathing.

I have often wondered whether Mandela’s release would have happened when it did without the combined force of organizing, boycotts, sanctions, internal resistance, international diplomacy, church pressure, student activism, labor organizing, underground networks, mass protest — and music. History is never that tidy. But together, these forces made apartheid harder and harder to sustain.

That is why I think it is fair to say the fall of apartheid as a formal system was not only a political achievement. It was also a cultural achievement. Culture helped make apartheid morally visible. It helped make South Africa’s struggle portable. It helped people around the world remember Mandela’s name, Steve Biko’s name, Soweto’s name, Sharpeville’s name. It gave the boycott movement sound, image, rhythm, story, and emotional force.

Nelson Mandela understood this. In Long Walk to Freedom, he wrote that African music can ignite political resolve and that “politics can be strengthened by music, but music has a potency that defies politics.”

Music has a power politics cannot fully manage. It can slip past the argument and go straight to the human being.

That is the point. Music did not replace politics. It did something politics could not do by itself. It reached people before they had read the policy. It stayed with them after the speech was over. It made distant suffering feel near. It made moral pressure singable.

So no, music alone did not free Mandela. But it is hard to imagine the global pressure that helped make his release possible without music, theatre, cultural boycott, and the artists who carried the struggle into the imagination of the world.

I am not suggesting America needs to import a South African model. I am suggesting America has known this before — and seems to be forgetting it again.

Miriam, Nina, and the convergence

Miriam Makeba is one of the clearest examples of what I mean. She was not only a singer. She was a witness. Her voice carried South Africa into rooms where South African politicians and activists could not always go. She took the sound, language, grief, dignity, and beauty of her people to the world. That mattered. A policy document can explain apartheid. A singer can make the world feel the human being underneath the policy.

Makeba’s life also showed the cost. She was exiled. Her music was political even when she was not singing a slogan. Her presence was political. Her language was political. Her dignity was political. Her refusal to be reduced was political. She did not only sing about the struggle. She embodied it.

That is one of the things art can do. Sometimes the art is political because of what it says. Sometimes it is political because of what it embodies.

Nina Simone, in another context, gave us one of the clearest lines about the role of an artist: “An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times.” She was not saying every artist has to write pamphlets with a melody attached. She was saying artists live inside history. They breathe the same air. They see the same violence. They feel the same grief. They watch the same contradictions. Simone went further: in desperate times, she said, “you can’t help but be involved.”

To reflect the times is not propaganda. It is honesty.

That is why her music still matters. It carried rage, beauty, grief, irony, tenderness, exhaustion, and defiance. She did not flatten the struggle into one emotion. She let it remain human, complicated, and dangerous in the best way. Movements need that. They need art that can hold more than one emotion at a time.

This is one reason the medley Miriam Makeba and Nina Simone recorded in 1990 matters so much. It happened in the wake of Mandela’s release, at a time when music and movement were inseparable. Here were two women who had carried different but connected struggles through song: South Africa and America, exile and civil rights, Black dignity, women’s voices, public courage, private cost.

That recording was not just a musical moment. It was a convergence. It carried comfort for the disheartened and strength for the courageous. That is what the best movement music does. It does not make struggle feel easy. It makes struggle feel shared.

Common People is now preparing to release a remix collaboration built from that 1990 medley. I do not mention that as a marketing detour. It sits inside the argument of this piece. Some songs carry courage from one season into another. This is one of them.

Whole soundscapes carry movements

Johnny Clegg and Sipho Mchunu’s Juluka were another kind of witness. Their interracial collaboration was a direct contradiction of apartheid logic. The threat was not only the lyrics. The threat was the friendship, the sound, the bodies on stage, the languages together, the Zulu dance steps, the fact of Black and white musicians making something together in public when the state was built to keep them apart.

Juluka did not just sing about another South Africa. They enacted one.

Sometimes art gives people a preview of the future before the law has caught up.

Then there was Hugh Masekela. You cannot really talk about anti-apartheid music without hearing that trumpet somewhere in the background — exile, longing, defiance, grief, and joy all coming through the same horn. “Bring Him Back Home,” written for Mandela while Masekela was in exile, became one of the great anthems of the anti-apartheid movement. “Release Mandela” could have remained a slogan, a campaign demand, a line on a poster. Masekela made it musical. He made return feel imaginable. He made the future sound like it was already walking toward us.

And of course, the soundscape was much wider than the few names that travel most easily in American memory. Stimela and Ray Phiri carried township soul, rock, and social commentary with songs that could be musically sleek and politically charged at the same time. Ladysmith Black Mambazo carried Zulu choral music into global consciousness. Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens, PJ Powers, Savuka, and many others helped create the larger musical atmosphere in which South Africans heard themselves, remembered themselves, danced, grieved, endured, and imagined life beyond apartheid.

Movements are not carried by a few iconic anthems alone. They are carried by whole soundscapes.

Even the debates around Paul Simon’s Graceland prove the point. People argued about the album because music mattered — because culture involved visibility, money, power, collaboration, boycott strategy, cultural ownership, and the global imagination around apartheid. Nobody was saying, “Well, it is just music.” They knew it was not.

The anti-apartheid struggle also moved through global popular music. Stevie Wonder, Peter Gabriel’s “Biko,” and Artists United Against Apartheid’s “Sun City” helped carry South Africa’s struggle into the global imagination. These songs did not end apartheid by themselves. Of course not. But that is the wrong standard.

A song does not have to do everything to do something.

Songs can help create moral pressure. They can educate people who were not paying attention. They can make a name unforgettable. They can turn a faraway injustice into something that enters the bloodstream of another society.

Theatre makes people sit with the truth

The same thing was happening in theatre. The Market Theatre in Johannesburg was not just a building where plays happened. It became one of the places where the country could tell the truth before the country was officially ready to hear it.

Founded in 1976, the same year as the Soweto uprising, the Market Theatre became known as South Africa’s “Theatre of the Struggle.” That phrase is not sentimental. It is accurate.

But the Market Theatre was more than a famous building with famous names attached. It was a place where artists could gather, rehearse, experiment, risk, and speak. It became a center, but the power was never limited to the building. The plays traveled. The actors traveled. The stories traveled. The ideas traveled.

That is the point: culture moves.

A play can start in one room and end up changing conversations across a country. A theatre can become a launchpad. A story can become portable. And the Market also reminds us that institutions matter. Movements need places where artists can work, not just appear at the end of the program and sing one song before the “serious people” come back to the microphone. Artists need rooms. They need time. They need collaborators. They need risk to be protected. They need stages where complexity is allowed.

The Market Theatre helped make that possible.

Then there is Woza Albert!, created by Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema, and Barney Simon, which may be one of the clearest examples of theatre doing what a speech cannot do. The play imagines Christ returning to apartheid South Africa as a Black South African man.

Not Christ as an abstract religious symbol floating politely above history. Christ with a body. Christ with a race. Christ with a passbook problem. Christ entering the machinery of apartheid and exposing the whole thing as morally obscene.

That is a brilliant theatrical move. It takes theology, satire, politics, absurdity, humor, and judgment and puts them on stage together. It asks a question a sermon could ask, but theatre makes you feel it in your stomach.

If Jesus came back into this system, would the system recognize him — or arrest him?

Mbongeni Ngema’s later work on Sarafina! carried another part of the struggle onto the stage. It did not treat the Soweto uprising as a history lesson alone. It gave it students, songs, classrooms, fear, courage, grief, dance, and young people trying to imagine freedom under impossible pressure. After Ngema’s death, President Cyril Ramaphosa said his productions “took South Africa and our continent into the theatres, homes and consciousness of millions of people around the world.”

Gibson Kente reminds us of something else: socially conscious art does not have to be elite. It can be popular. It can have music. It can have humor. It can have melodrama. It can have rhythm. It can meet ordinary people where they are. It can draw crowds. It can be emotionally direct.

Sometimes people make the mistake of thinking “serious” art has to be difficult, bleak, and inaccessible. No. Some of the most powerful movement art is popular. It is singable. Repeatable. Performable. Quotable. Adaptable. If justice art cannot travel, it is not doing all it can do.

Theatre can show fear, compromise, cowardice, courage, confusion, propaganda, grief, ego, love, and awakening all in the same room — which is inconvenient, but also, you know, life.

It can show how people become complicit, how propaganda works, how fear gets inherited, how power seduces, how activists burn out, how families divide, how good intentions become control, how people change slowly, and how courage is born in ordinary people. It can speak to people at different stages of the journey too. Not everyone is ready for the same sentence at the same time. Some people need confrontation. Some need invitation. Some need to grieve. Some need to repent. Some need courage. Some need to laugh so they do not collapse. Some need to see themselves before they can change.

The pattern was never only South African

This is not only a South African story. America has known this too.

Billie Holiday did not let lynching remain a statistic. Mahalia Jackson brought the authority of the Black church into public struggle. Odetta, Mavis Staples, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Nina Simone, and Tracy Chapman all carried memory, grief, truth, beauty, and public courage in their voices — not as decoration, but as part of the work itself.

The pattern keeps showing up across countries and musical traditions: Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, Bob Marley, Fela Kuti, Victor Jara, Sinéad O’Connor, Angélique Kidjo, Chance the Rapper, Kendrick Lamar, and many others. These artists are all very different. That is the point. Movement music has never had one sound. It has sounded like gospel, folk, soul, reggae, hip-hop, Afrobeat, protest song, blues, spirituals, pop, and things that do not fit neatly in a box.

The shared thread is simple: the songs helped people remember what power wanted them to forget.

Tracy Chapman is especially important here because her songs show that justice music does not always have to arrive as a big anthem with a raised fist and a drumline. Sometimes it arrives quietly, with an acoustic guitar and a voice that refuses to dress up the truth.

“Fast Car” is not a policy paper about poverty, family breakdown, work, addiction, gender, and the dream of escape. Thank goodness. But it lets you feel all of that inside one life. “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution” does not shout its revolution. It almost whispers it, which somehow makes it more haunting. “Behind the Wall” holds domestic violence with almost unbearable restraint. “Across the Lines” names racial division without turning it into a lecture.

That is another kind of movement work. Chapman does not turn social issues into slogans. She writes people. She brings the listener close enough to the story that the issue starts breathing.

Stories that make the issue breathe

Lorraine Hansberry did not write a speech about housing discrimination. She wrote a family. She wrote a living room. She wrote dreams under pressure. And because she did, America had to look at race, housing, dignity, money, family, gender, and hope through actual people, not just policy language.

That is what theatre does when it is working. It makes the issue breathe.

James Baldwin gives us one of the best phrases for this whole argument. He called the artist an “emotional or spiritual historian.” I love that. Movements do not only need someone to record what happened. They need someone to help us remember what it felt like while it was happening. That is how memory becomes human. That is how the next generation inherits more than dates, slogans, and grainy photos.

Baldwin is also often quoted as saying that the artist’s role is like the role of a lover: “If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” That is not flattery. That is love with a flashlight.

Sometimes the pinprick is what gets through.

Anna Deavere Smith gives another model. Her documentary theatre is not escape. It is a way of gathering people around real voices, real conflict, and real questions. She has talked about the “convening power of the theater” — the way theatre can bring strangers into the same room to think and talk about race, education, inequality, violence, and responsibility.

That phrase matters: convening power.

Theatre does not only tell a story. It gathers people around a story and then leaves them sitting near each other afterwards.

Suzan-Lori Parks gives us a beautiful way to think about theatre and memory. She talks about theatre as a place to “make” history, especially when Black history has been ignored, erased, or broken apart. She describes the playwright’s work as digging for bones, hearing “the bones sing,” and writing it down.

That is culture as resurrection work. Not resurrection as a slogan. Resurrection as excavation, listening, memory, stage lights, and someone in row G trying not to cry too loudly.

Film, public imagination, and the stories underneath the law

Film has become one of the main ways people understand the world now. For better or worse, a lot of people are not reading policy papers on a Saturday night.

Bryan Stevenson makes the core point from the justice side. He keeps saying we have to change the narratives underneath the issues. That matters because bad policy usually has a bad story under it. A story about who is dangerous. Who is lazy. Who belongs. Who does not. Who deserves mercy. Who does not. Who gets protected. Who gets thrown away.

Change the law, yes. Absolutely. But if the story underneath the law stays alive, it will just grow another law.

That is why Ava DuVernay’s work matters. Films like Selma, 13th, When They See Us, and Origin take big systems — racism, policing, incarceration, history, caste, power — and bring them down to the level of actual human lives. She does not lose the systems. She just refuses to let them stay abstract.

DuVernay has said, “Storytelling is power. And power makes people uncomfortable.” Systems like to hide behind paperwork, court language, bureaucracy, and phrases that sound neutral. Film gives those systems faces.

A statistic can inform you. A story can follow you home.

Broadway is not the whole theatre world. Obviously. It is expensive, commercial, and occasionally behaves as if the average human family has seven thousand dollars set aside for mezzanine seats and parking.

But Broadway still matters because it can move certain stories into the public imagination at scale. for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf gave Black women’s inner lives a form that was poetic, embodied, communal, and impossible to reduce.

And argument is part of the point. Culture gets people talking at a scale most white papers can only dream about while staring sadly at their download numbers.

America has known this before

The Harlem Renaissance matters here because it was not only an explosion of art. It was a way of saying, “We are not who America said we are.” Black writers, musicians, actors, dancers, painters, and thinkers were making beauty, intelligence, style, humor, grief, pleasure, and modern life visible. They were telling a fuller story.

Zora Neale Hurston, Bessie Smith, Josephine Baker, Augusta Savage, and so many others were not only making art. They were helping Black life appear in fuller color — beauty, intelligence, style, humor, grief, pleasure, faith, danger, and modern life.

That matters for justice movements. A people cannot only be shown through their suffering. They also need art that shows their fullness. The Harlem Renaissance helped build a kind of cultural confidence that fed political imagination. Jazz clubs, poetry, theatre, novels, visual art, and social gatherings all became part of a bigger re-telling of Black life.

The civil rights movement understood this too. Freedom songs were not entertainment before the meeting began. They were part of the meeting. They helped people become brave enough to do what needed to be done. Martin Luther King Jr. said freedom songs played “a strong and vital role” in the struggle. They gave people courage, unity, and hope.

That is not a small thing. People were facing jail, violence, lost jobs, humiliation, and death. And songs helped them keep going. The point is not that songs replaced strategy. The point is that songs helped people survive strategy. Organizing is hard. Courage leaks. Hope leaks. Attention leaks. Songs help refill the room.

Malcolm X understood that the struggle was cultural too. He talked about the need for a cultural revolution to “un-brainwash” people. That is sharp language, but he was naming something real. Oppression does not only control laws and institutions. It gets into imagination. It teaches people what to think of themselves. It teaches lies about history, beauty, intelligence, power, and belonging.

So liberation has to involve more than changing policy. It also has to involve recovering memory, dignity, and self-understanding. That is cultural work. Music, theatre, storytelling, film, dance, poetry, and visual art all help people recover what propaganda tried to steal.

What performing arts can do

Performing arts change the atmosphere. The right song, in the right moment, can do in three minutes what twelve speeches are still circling forty-five minutes later. Songs and plays help events stay alive after the news cycle gets bored and wanders off to the next fire. Theatre can show where propaganda, fear, shame, hope, and contradiction actually live. Music makes courage communal. Story gives movements language people can carry — a melody, a line, an image, a scene.

And that matters because culture multiplies. A song can be sung almost anywhere. A play can be staged, taught, adapted, argued with, licensed, and passed on. A film can send a story into rooms the organizers may never enter. Performing arts help make the future imaginable. Movements cannot only describe what they oppose. They have to help people feel what another world might be like.

So why does this feel less central now?

That is the question I cannot shake. Why do so many justice spaces still end up treating music as a nice opener, theatre as a special event, artists as occasional guests, and storytelling as something the communications team does after the lawyers have finished talking?

I do not ask that as an accusation. There are reasons. The economics of music are brutal. Theatre is expensive. Touring is harder than people imagine. Streaming has trained us to think songs appear out of nowhere for almost no money. Artists are under pressure to feed platforms, build brands, avoid controversy, and survive. Movements are under pressure to respond quickly, raise money, win cases, manage crises, and keep the lights on.

Everybody is tired. Everybody has a spreadsheet. Everybody has a group chat they are pretending not to see.

Still, the question remains: if earlier movements understood culture as essential, why have we allowed it to become optional?

The case

So the case is simple. Not small. But simple.

If we want justice movements to become durable, we need to recover the role of the performing arts. Not as filler. Not as entertainment before the real program starts. Not as a celebrity endorsement. Not as a mood-setter while people find their seats. But as part of how movements gather, remember, interpret, grieve, imagine, and endure.

This is the kind of work Common People is trying to learn from and participate in. Not art as decoration. Not activism stripped of beauty, memory, and song. But culture as one of the ways justice becomes durable. The point is not to boast about our role in that story. The point is to listen to the long tradition of people who understood that songs, stories, stages, films, rituals, and performances can help a movement remember what it is fighting for and who it is trying to become.

We need communal songs and crafted songs. We need theatre that can handle contradiction. We need stories that can travel. We need film that can humanize systems. We need public rituals that keep memory alive. We need church basements, classrooms, festivals, community theatres, university stages, choirs, concerts, and ordinary rooms where people gather around something more durable than the latest emergency.

We need work that comforts the disheartened and emboldens the courageous. We need work that communicates nuance. We need work that can pierce the human psyche without flattening the human being. We need work that carries urgency into memory, meaning, and practice.

I think here of South Africa again. The state banned our songs in September 1988. The songs leaked through anyway. And when the ban finally lifted — when political prisoners were being freed and the liberation movements were unbanned — the broadcasting corporation that had silenced us gave us a final show, airing between the Wimbledon final and the World Cup final, which meant a lot of people saw it.

The state tried to silence the music. The music outlasted the state.

That is what culture can do.

Because when culture stops carrying memory, movements keep starting over.

And we do not have time to keep starting over.