Forty years after Steve Biko’s murder in detention, the world we live in has not changed fundamentally for Black people. Regardless of where you reside in the world, how educated you are, religious, progressive or nice you may think you are, if you are Black you are guaranteed the scorn, humiliation, violence and death that Biko and others had to confront.

Black people are quickly labeled racist any time we raise our voice against white supremacy. It is racism fighting back. It is meant to silence us. We should not openly express what we feel and know. As Black people we should not own our experiences and history. No. We are instead supposed to become complicit in our oppression by attributing our suffering to everything else except white supremacy.

South African colonial modernity fabulously benefited those who prosecuted cruel adventuring; their descendants still enjoy the ill-gotten social wages. 1994 didn’t usher a new society, so decolonisation remains an unfinished undertaking. A national project that rehabilitates and restores the full humanity of the victims of racism is an urgent necessity now.

Kwame Ture was initially resistant to raising the slogan but after his unjust arrest took the podium and said "We Want Black Power!" The enthusiastic response would usher in a new era in the African American liberation struggle impacting the political discourse for at least another decade.

Ali is one of the greatest and most influential activist celebrities in the world. In an era where sports endorsements and lucrative sponsorships have silenced any measure of radicalism or integrity in the sports world, his career sets him apart.

Muhammad Ali had the courage to stand up in the face of racism, injustice, oppression and unfairness and refuse to back down come hell or high water.

Muhammad said he was pleased to come to Ghana - from an America where black people had to struggle for their ordinary human rights - to find back people running their whole country “beautifully”. Americans, he said, were being misinformed that Africans were eating each other and climbing up and down trees.

When Cassius Clay stood up in Miami, Florida, and said my name is Muhammad Ali, he was in fact the greatest boxer and African patriot. When he stood up in front of a federal courthouse in Houston, Texas, and said “my fight is right here with you,” that was the Ali of the people. That was the greatest. But he, too, had his contradictions.

It is not correct to say that racism is a problem affecting black people only. Regardless of whether or not they have the means and advantages of history to institutionalize racism, black people can be racist.