Remembering Assata Olugbala Shakur: A Revolutionary Woman Who Chose Her African Identity

On this day, September 25, 2026, one year ago, we remember a great comrade, a brilliant and revolutionary woman — Assata Olugbala Shakur.

“I didn’t know what a fool they had made out of me until I grew up and started to read real history.”

These words capture one of the most important themes of Assata Shakur’s life: the power of discovering history for oneself. For Assata, education was not simply about acquiring information. It was about questioning the history she had been taught, confronting the systems that had shaped her understanding of herself and her people, and searching for an identity rooted in African history, struggle and liberation.

Assata Shakur was born JoAnne Deborah Byron in New York in 1947 and later became known as JoAnne Chesimard. She eventually rejected that name and adopted the name Assata Olugbala Shakur, explaining that she regarded her former name as a “slave name.” In her autobiography, she described the process of choosing a name that reflected the person she had become and the political and cultural consciousness she had developed.

The name itself carried profound meaning for her. According to explanations attributed to Assata, Assata meant “she who struggles,” Shakur meant “the thankful,” while Olugbala was associated with “love for the people.” Some secondary sources give slightly different English renderings of Olugbala, including “savior,” but the central point remains that she deliberately chose names connected to struggle, gratitude, African identity and collective responsibility.

Her choice of name was therefore much more than a personal preference. It represented a conscious rejection of an imposed identity and an attempt to reclaim a connection to African heritage. Assata’s political consciousness developed during the turbulent struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. She became involved with the Black Panther Party and later with the Black Liberation Army, placing herself within the wider Black liberation struggles of her era.

But Assata’s story cannot be reduced simply to the organisations she joined or the criminal case that ultimately resulted in her imprisonment. Her life was also a story about identity, education, resistance, womanhood, political consciousness and the search for historical truth. Her 1988 autobiography, Assata: An Autobiography, remains one of the principal sources through which she narrated her own experiences and political development.

Perhaps one of the most powerful aspects of her identity was her insistence on seeing herself as African. She did not need to have been physically born on the African continent to regard Africa as central to who she was. She understood African identity as something shaped not only by geography, but also by history, ancestry, culture, political consciousness and solidarity.

As she wrote:

“It sounded so strange when people called me JoAnne. It really had nothing to do with me and my heritage. I didn’t feel like no JoAnne, or no Negro, or no amerikan. I felt like an African woman when I am called Assata Shakur Olugbala.”

That statement speaks to a wider historical experience among people of African descent whose ancestors were forcibly removed from the continent and subjected to systems that attempted to erase or redefine their identities. Assata’s decision to reclaim an African identity was therefore deeply connected to the broader question of historical memory.

She spent the final decades of her life in Cuba after escaping from prison in 1979 and receiving political asylum there. She remained in political exile until her death in Havana on September 25, 2025, at the age of 78. Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported her death and attributed it to advanced age and health conditions.

Her legacy remains deeply contested. U.S. authorities regarded her as a fugitive convicted in connection with the 1973 killing of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster, while Assata maintained her innocence and her supporters have long portrayed her as a political prisoner and revolutionary. These competing interpretations are part of the historical record surrounding her life.

Yet beyond the arguments over how history should judge her political actions, there is another part of Assata’s legacy that deserves continued examination: her insistence that oppressed people must learn their own history and consciously define themselves.

She challenged the idea that liberation begins only with changing governments or political institutions. For her, liberation also involved changing how people understood themselves — learning the history that had been suppressed, questioning inherited assumptions and recovering identities that colonialism, slavery and racism had attempted to destroy.

Assata Olugbala Shakur never had to step foot on the African continent to consider herself an African woman. Her Africa was carried through history, ancestry, consciousness and struggle.

One year after her transition, we remember her not merely as a name from the history of Black radicalism, but as a woman who challenged generations to read, question, learn and think for themselves.

Remember Assata.
Read her words.
Study her history.
Interrogate the history you were taught.
And never stop searching for the truth.

Assata Olugbala Shakur — 1947–2025.

Her life ended, but the questions she raised remain.