Safiya Bukhari never set out to join the Black Panthers. As a child, the now-legendary activist aspired to the upper-middle class comfort of her parents, and her first encounter with the organization came only when her sorority volunteered at their free breakfast program: “I couldn’t get into the politics of the Black Panther Party, but I could volunteer to feed some hungry children,” her comrade Mumia Abu-Jamal’s autobiography tells us. When attendance at the breakfasts declined, she asked around with parents in the community and discovered police had been spreading the lie that these breakfasts were poisoned. Later, when she observed the police arresting a young man selling the Black Panther newspaper, the diligent student informed the officers of the man’s constitutional rights. The cops threw her in prison too. After her parents bailed her out, she explained to them how the situation had shaken her understanding of the world. She kissed them goodbye and caught the next flight out to Harlem to join the Black Panther Party.
Toussaint L’Ouverture never set out to liberate a nation. The Haitian general was raised as an enslaved domestic servant and devout Catholic. Upon winning his freedom, he identified strongly as a freed Frenchman, endorsing progressive legal action for enslaved residents of Saint-Domingue that had been granted to Black citizens of France. At the beginning of the revolts in 1791 which would become the Haitian Revolution, he was involved in negotiations to return white prisoners in exchange for a ban on the use of whips and an extra non-working day per week. As early skirmishes began to favor the colonizers, with famine and plantation defenses weakening the rebels, L’Ouverture and fellow leaders Georges Biassou and Jean-François Papillon attempted to strike a deal, offering to oversee a ceasefire in exchange for the freedom of 400 of the movement’s leaders. Negotiations were tense, and when the bigoted colonizers resisted the thought of allowing their status to even a handful of Black people, L’Ouverture used his plenary power to reduce the requested number of freed rebels from 400 to 60. Even this, the colonizers could not support. “Then and only then did Toussaint come to an unalterable decision from which he never wavered and for which he died. Complete liberty for all, to be attained and held by their own strength,” seminal historian C.L.R James tells us. The war had begun.
To note the moderate origins of these figures is not to detract from their revolutionary credentials. None of us are born aware of the mechanisms that oppress us, and for a young adult to imagine the state would lie and let children go hungry for political points, or to understand that their neighbors would rather see their entire society burn than allow 60 Black people to join it, exceeds the imagination of all but the most paranoid. Rather, these origin stories speak to the conditions necessary for rebellion to root itself in one’s spirit — conditions that depend both on the individual and the injustice they are exposed to.
This journey towards revolutionary political awareness isn’t one we see very often in mainstream media. Hollywood loves a crowd-pleasing, moderate ending that upholds the status quo, and even if a writer had the interest, skill, and clout to bring a complex, radical story to the screen, finding popularity with audiences would be its own challenge. For Tony Gilroy and his team of writers on Andor the solution to these issues of maintaining dramatic tension, conveying the weight of historical oppression in your fictional world, and getting audiences to care came in their approach to the Star Wars franchise. They used Star Wars, one of the largest properties in the world, not as a point of reverence, but as a context for a different type of story: one about the decisions everyday people, with revolutionary potential but common aspirations, make in Harlem, Ferrix, Haiti, Coruscant, and everywhere in between.
Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) never set out to give his life as an operative of the Rebel Alliance. Raised in a loving, comfortable home by his adopted mother Maarva (Fiona Shaw), Cassian moves through the world as a young man aware of oppression, thanks to his mother’s activist credentials, but unconcerned with how it might affect him. His stated purpose in the show’s pilot is to find his missing sister, the kind of personal quest Star Wars has trafficked in for decades. His personal history, which unfolds over the season’s first three episodes, is not unrelated to his eventual belief in a cause greater than himself, but it is not enough. It takes a cascading series of events, which unfolds across the season, for him to make the climactic decision to join rebel mastermind Luthen (Stellan Skarsgård) as a willing participant in the movement.
It is not, solely, the Empire’s oppression of Cassian’s adopted home planet of Ferrix, Cassian’s recipience of a manifesto written by his young, principled friend Nemik (Alex Lawther) after Nemik’s death, his front-row view to the injustice of the Empire’s prison systems, or even his mother’s posthumous call to arms which inspires Cassian to set off with Luthen towards his eventual fate as a martyr for the Rebellion. Although his mother’s self-epitaph is the decisive spark, Gilroy and company let these experiences slowly take effect on their protagonist. This allows Luna to luxuriate in the character’s less admirable but oh-so enjoyable qualities — selfishness, short-temperedness, deceptiveness — and speaks to a truth reflected in the stories of Safiya Bukhari, Toussaint L’ouverture, and so many others. The journey towards learning to see the world as in need of rebuilding is slow until it becomes near-immediate: “the day will come when…these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire’s authority and then there will be one too many,” Nemik tells us in his manifesto. Belief in the possibility for greater justice within the status quo is a pliable mindset that can adjust to any number of experiences; until it isn’t.
Perhaps the clearest literary predecessor of Andor is The Motorcycle Diaries, a travel diary by Cuban Revolution leader Che Guevara. The Motorcycle Diaries is another work about the youthful adventures of a figure whose priorities are immensely self-involved until they aren’t. Most of the book follows Guevara as he attempts to swindle wine and cheese from poor village people in various South American countries, and as fun as these sections can be, the book’s raison d’etre clearly lies in our glimpses of the revolutionary Guevara will one day become. As he sees a woman dying of asthma in Chile, he muses “it’s time that those who govern spent less time publicizing their own virtues and more money, much more money, funding socially useful works.” Visiting a school for Indigenous youth in Peru, he opines that the education system “[renders them at] the severe disadvantage of having to fight within a hostile white society which refuses to accept them.”
Guevara sees all these things and then keeps it moving, hoping to make it to the next town, content to “move for eternity along the roads and seas of the world.” But these people and their stories left an impression, and years later, when reflecting on his travels, he realized them as the time he determined that “when the great guiding spirit cleaves humanity into two antagonistic halves, I [will] be with the people.” The seeds of Cassian’s future politics also lie in the tapestry of his encounters throughout the season, and in the ways they provide context for the beliefs he isn’t yet able to articulate.
Those who oppress the weak and downtrodden in society could, of course, just not do that — it takes far more than a single instance of inhumane treatment towards a people for those people to revolt. So it is crucial that Andor shows us not just the effects of imperial rule, but its mechanisms, and the ways that authoritarian power begets nothing but increased authoritarianism. Through the journeys of Imperial officers Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) and Syril Karn (Kyle Soller), the show dramatizes the ways the Empire co-opts innovation, compliance, and personal growth to tighten the clenching of its fist, ultimately fueling the rebellion which will defeat it. “Tyranny requires constant effort,” after all.
That any of us who grew up visiting a galaxy far, far away know the results of Cassian’s efforts is a context that reinforces that his journey, although personal, is not his alone. “To be a revolutionary,” Guevara tells us, “there must first be a revolution.” The finale of Andor’s first season sees Cassian take a back seat for most of the episode, and the force which is ultimately harnessed is not an individual one, but a collective spirit for action, as the people of Ferrix fight back against the Empire. It is as a part of this unified reckoning that Cassian pledges himself to the revolution; ultimately, the growth he experiences is most powerful as a symbol of the strength of common people that rebellions, true or fictionalized, are built on. “A revolution needs an entire people mobilized,” Guevara tells us. “Power to the people!” the Black Panther Party preaches. “They have in me struck down but the trunk of the tree; the roots are many and deep – they will shoot up again!” says L’Ouverture. Andor, the show, is about Andor, the individual, not because he displays a heroism we can never aspire to, but because he’s the type of hero any of us could be, and many of us are. “One single thing will break the siege,” Nemik says. That thing, Andor posits, could be us.
