"We are the ones we've been waiting for"

A perennial favourite song of mine is one I call "we are the ones."

It's come up a few times in our local community song circle. Some members have asked about the song's origins or shared their own sense of the connections in, within, and weaving through this song.

Listening to these stories, I realized my connection to the song was incomplete. This is my attempt to get down how the song came into my life, where from, what its lineage is (loosely), and so on.

One thing in the song's history is clear: for decades the phrase "we are the ones we've been waiting for" has been used to motivate action towards, in particular, Black and Women's liberation. Its roots run from anti-apartheid action in South Africa through to the Black American freedom-song tradition.

Like so much good music, this song, too, comes out of Africa and the African Diaspora.

Let's get into it.

Learning the song

I can't remember where I learned the song for the first time, but am quite confident it was from my brother, Ian Carrick, to whom I am forever grateful for bringing me into the community singing scene.

Ian tells me he learned from his friend and mentor Liz Rog, who adapted it from the first track on the 1998 album "twenty five" by the famous, Grammy-winning group Sweet Honey In the Rock.

As our first aside in case you're not familiar with Sweet Honey In the Rock. Sweet Honey In the Rock is a Sweet Honey In the Rock is an all-woman, African American a cappella ensemble founded in Washington, D.C. in 1973 by Bernice Johnson Reagon, named after a gospel song about a land so rich that honey flows when you break open the rocks. Over the decades, the group has written, arranged, and recorded songs that probe the social issues of their time. Their discography runs over 40 years and well over a dozen albums.

You can hear their version of "We Are the Ones (We Been Waitin' For)" on Spotify and YouTube.

Where the song comes from

The group’s founder, the late Bernice Johnson Reagon, is credited with writing the tune. Long before Sweet Honey, Reagon was a song leader in the civil rights movement and a founding member of the SNCC Freedom Singers, who came out of the Albany Movement in Georgia. Over the years she set several of June Jordan’s poems to music, and “We Are the Ones” is one of them.

Which brings us to our second aside: the poem.

The poem (and black peoples' liberation)

June Jordan (1936–2002) was a poet, essayist, teacher, and activist, born in Harlem to Jamaican immigrants. The words of our song are the last line of her “Poem for South African Women”, which she presented at the United Nations on August 9, 1978.

I reprint the poem here, as it is very much worth reading:

The poem commemorates the Women’s March of August 9, 1956. That day some 20,000 women of all races marched on the Union Buildings in Pretoria, South Africa, to protest the extension of apartheid’s "pass laws" to Black women (Jordan’s dedication honours 40,000 women and children). Pass laws forced Black South Africans to carry a passbook, the hated dompas, which controlled where they could live, work, and travel. For decades they applied only to men; in the early 1950s, the government moved to extend them to women. The August 9 march was in protest to this extension of government control and surveillance.

Arriving at the Union Buildings, the marchers delivered their petitions (signed by more than 100,000 women) stood in silence for thirty minutes, and then they sang. One song, which march leader Sophia Williams-De Bruyn remembered as spontaneous and unrehearsed, became an anthem: Wathint’ abafazi, wathint’ imbokodo, “you strike the women, you strike a rock.”

Here's a version of that tune reinterpreted by the Ndebele musician Nothembi Mkwebane. You can see photos of that day and more history in this online exhibit.

South Africa still marks August 9 as National Women’s Day.

So, June Jordan's poem, the context within which and for which it was written, informed Bernice Johnson Reagon's adaptation of the final line of the poem into an arrangement for Sweet Honey In the Rock. Liz Rog adapted and, in many ways, simplified that song for community singing spaces, where we sing it still.

That is, as best I can tell, the most direct line of the song we sing.

Other places the poem has found roots

Alice Walker

However, the phrase has also travelled well beyond the song. Alice Walker, the novelist best known for The Color Purple, used it as the title of her 2006 collection of essays and meditations, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For (also available on the internet archive.) She credits Jordan for the words and Sweet Honey for the song, and she writes about watching thousands of people rise to their feet when they hear it.

21st Century American Improvement

Barack Obama used the line to roaring applause in his Super Tuesday speech in Chicago on February 5, 2008 (transcript), pairing it with “we are the change that we seek. This speech and the milieux of American improvement of the 'aughts inspired the will.i.am tune of the same name, "We Are the Ones."

Hopi connection

A member of our local group mentioned recently that the line is related to a “Hopi Elders’ Prophecy". I've done a bit of digging to find out more about this and the best I can find credits this to a 2000 gathering of Hopi elders in Oraibi, Arizona or to New Age writing that began circulating online around 1999.

Given that both of these sources come nearly 20 years after June Jordan's poem, I'm doubtful it originates there.

The Hopi are one of hundreds of sovereign Native nations on Turtle Island threatened by Western expansion and European colonisation. As with so much indigenous history, it is a rich, complex, and nuance history here that I don't know too much about. Even saying "the Hopi tribe" is, in a way, a misnomer, as there are many different groups among the Hopi and they are often opposed.

Nonetheless, Hopi people have carried their own message to the world stage. In 1948, traditional Hopi elders chose four messengers to share their prophecies with the outside world, and one of them, Thomas Banyacya, spent decades trying to address the United Nations. On December 10, 1992, at the ceremony opening the International Year of the World’s Indigenous People, he finally did.

This was a moment of Hopi people speaking for themselves, in their own terms, to the world. Banyacya's obituary provides an excellent overview of some of the nuances of the Hopi deciding how to bring their culture's "prophecies" into the modern world.

I watched a recording of his address, and there's no line about "we are the ones we've been waiting for". He also died on February 6, 1999, more than a year before the “prophecy” is dated.

Closer to home, in 1976, Banyacya spoke at the UN Habitat Forum in Vancouver, after Hopi people had been denied a hearing at the General Assembly in New York.

The Hopi people and their leaders have their own reasons to assert and defend their sovereignty in the modern era—a project only necessary because of colonial presence and a need that has grown out of more than a century of outsiders recording and publishing Hopi ceremonial knowledge without their consent.

Concluding thoughts

For me—and my group of mostly white, mostly immigrant / settler singers on Vancouver Island—there's some complexity here. I understand the impulse to trace our song to a “prophecy” by “Hopi elders”: it lends the song depth and the weight of elder wisdom.

At the same time, crediting words to Indigenous elders who may never have said them is a way of speaking for Indigenous people instead of listening to them, and that habit has long helped erode Indigenous sovereignty. I'm not a Hopi person and it isn't my place to speak about their prophecies.

What's more, crediting the line to Hopi elders does a sneaky move of writing June Jordan and the women of Pretoria out of their own story.

On top of all of this, I just don't see the need to bring in the Hopi angle. The song already carries plenty of anti-colonial weight through its direct line to the women who stood up to apartheid.

So for me, I'll choose to leave out the Hopi connection when I introduce the song, choosing instead to lean into the story of June Jordan and the women of Pretoria.

By no means, however, does any of this diminish the central message of the song: of people seeing themselves as their own saviours and salvation; that no one from outside will come to embetter our situation; that we are the very ones we need.