We call your name so you may not sleep: An ancestral reckoning for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

News24

27-05-2025

The US Secretary of Health may continue to operate with impunity and will probably never face formal consequences. But he will not escape the memory of what he has done, writes Tian Johnson.
Earlier this month, the world marked HIV Vaccine Awareness Day. But there is little to commemorate and even less to celebrate. This year, we did not light candles or wear ribbons.
Instead, we invoke. We remember. We indict. And we speak directly to the man whose name sits atop the crumbling pillars of US global health leadership, US Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
This is a man whose record of anti-science crusades and institutional sabotage is long, unapologetic, and deliberate.
Kennedy began to engineer a health policy crisis within days of taking office. His decades-long hostility toward public health institutions has now taken governmental form, weaponised at scale, under the guise of freedom and sovereignty.
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He oversaw the suspension of NIH-led global HIV vaccine trials, terminated collaborations with African research centres, and slashed funding to NIH-supported HIV prevention programmes, redirecting resources to politically loyal actors whose mandates serve ideology, not health.
But this is not a lament for lost funding or technical setbacks. It is a reckoning for choices made in full awareness of their consequences. The dismantling of HIV vaccine research and the evisceration of the NIH's global agenda was carried out by a leadership that understood exactly who would suffer and moved forward anyway.
And so, on this day, we call not just on the living, but on those who have walked this path long before us. We call on our ancestors, not as decoration, but as witnesses.
Calculated dehumanisation
From southern Africa, we call forth the spirit of Nehanda Charwe Nyakasikana. She was a medium of the mhondoro lion spirits, a custodian of Shona sovereignty, and a revolutionary woman who resisted British colonisation with fearless conviction.
Nehanda was hanged in 1898 after leading a rebellion against the violent extraction of African life and land. Today, she returns not in chains but in fury, standing in the halls of power where death is now dealt through policy. Her spirit recognises the patterns.
The calculated dehumanisation. The indifference dressed as pragmatism. She knows what happens when powerful men decide which bodies are worth saving.
From the ashes of the Kingdom of Kongo rises Kimpa Vita, burned alive in 1706 for daring to preach that God was Black and that the divine resided in the people, not in the churches of the empire. She was a prophet, a young woman of vision and fire, who tried to reimagine faith as justice, not hierarchy. Her death was the result of a system that feared truth spoken from below. She, too, understands this moment.
Vita knows the language of erasure, the slow burial of community knowledge, and the silencing of those who speak for the sick, the poor, the queer, and the dispossessed - the othered.
And from the spiritual traditions of the African diaspora in Haiti and beyond, the Loa rise, those powerful intermediaries between the living and the divine, guardians of the crossroads. There is Papa Legba, opener of gates, standing now between justice and denial.
There is Mambo Ayizan, protector of spiritual knowledge and initiator of healing, watching silently as the institutions that once pledged public health abandon it piece by piece.
And there is Baron Samedi, lord of the dead, dressed in a top hat and dark glasses, smiling grimly over the graves of those who died waiting for medicines, for trials, for care that was never intended to reach them.
Calling for accountability
These spirits do not come for ceremony. They come for accountability. And they have come because we, the living, have tried every other way. We have submitted proposals, made calls, pleaded our case in boardrooms and on the steps of capitols. We have translated need into metrics, urgency into infographics, survival into strategic plans. But our truth has been met with silence.
We watch this unfold with the clarity of those who have seen it before. African nations have long served as the proving ground for Western science, called upon when samples are needed, when disease becomes global enough to matter, when headlines demand a success story. But when the trials require sustained commitment, when justice demands partnership, when the story shifts from generosity to accountability, the exits are already marked. This is not new. This is history repeating itself under sterile lights and air-conditioned deception.
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But the lie is no longer sustainable. The idea that American health leadership exists to serve the world is dead. And we will not attend its funeral with reverence.
We speak now with fire, because our grief has fermented into something sharper. This is not sadness, it is fury born of being lied to, again and again, by those who hold the resources and still choose to hoard them. While press releases and social media campaigns provide sanitised narratives of progress, we will speak the truth. Not in their language, but in our own.
We will speak with the voices of the ancestors who remind us that no power is eternal, and no harm is forgotten. We will speak from the ground, where movements are being rebuilt not with donor funds, but with rage and resilience.
Operating with impunity
In the US, the health secretary may continue to operate with impunity. He may never face formal consequences. But he will not escape the memory of what he has done. The ancestors walk with long shadows. Their justice may not be swift, but it is certain. It arrives in the stories we tell, in the work we continue, in the refusal to be silent or polite in the face of strategic violence.
We call his name not to elevate it, but to bind it to the harm he has wrought. Let it echo in the clinics he defunded, in the labs he silenced, and in the histories that will remember him not as a reformer, but as an executioner of global solidarity.
We call it so it will tremble every time it is spoken in rooms where he believes he is safe. We call it to remind him, and all those who follow, that power used to destroy will never be protected from memory.
We cast our vision beyond Kennedy. We speak to those who will carry this fight long after he is gone. We speak to the young, to the angry, to the brave. To those who still believe that healing is a right, not a reward. To those who understand that justice is not a metaphor. It is, and must be, the standard.
We also remember the nameless who bled in silence and those who shouted and were ignored. Because remembering is how we keep the fire burning.
Forgetting is how the hateful win.
- Tian Johnson is a strategist at the Pan-African health justice non-profit, the African Alliance.
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