Abstract
Since the early 1980s, comparative historians of South Africa and the United States have shifted much of their attention from the structures and ideologies of white domination to the movements for black liberation that developed after the end of slavery or the completion of conquest. The pioneering top-down comparisons of John Cell, Stanley B. Greenberg, and myself, have been replaced by bottom-up studies of the commonalities and interactions of black struggles against white political and cultural hegemony. J. Mutero Chirenje and James Campbell have studied the transit of turn-of-the-century religious separatism, or ‘Ethiopianism’; Robert Hill and Gregory Pirio, following the lead of Robert Edgar, have examined the Garvey movement’s extension to South Africa; Tim Couzens has dealt with the black South African literary response to the African American cultural renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s; and David Coplan has probed musical and theatrical influences. These studies reveal the salience of black America as an example or inspiration for South African blacks in the period between the 1880s and the 1940s and suggest that there was more of a sense of identity or similarity than might have been anticipated from the comparisons of patterns of domination.1
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Notes
For comparisons of white supremacy, see G. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York, 1981);
J. Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (New York, 1982);
S. Greenberg, Race and the State in Capitalist Development: Comparative Perspectives (New Haven, 1980);
and Lamar and L. Thompson (eds), The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared (New Haven, 1981). Studies of the connections between African-American and black South African ideologies and movements include
J. Mutero Chirenje, Ethiopianism and Afro-Americans in Southern Africa, 1883–1916 (Baton Rouge, 1987);
J. Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (New York, 1995);
R. Hill and G. Pirio, ‘“Africa for the Africans”: The Garvey Movement in South Africa’, in The Politics of Race, Class, and Nationalism in Twentieth Century South Africa, edited by S. Marks and S. Trapido (London, 1987), pp. 209–53;
R. Edgar, ‘Garveyism in Africa: Dr Wellington and the American Movement in the Transkei’, Ufahuma, 6, 1 (1976), pp. 31–57;
T. Couzens, ‘“Moralizing Leisure Time”: The Transatlantic Connection, 1918–1936’, in Industrialization and Social Change in South Africa, 1870–1930, edited by S. Marks and R. Rathbone (London, 1982), pp. 314–37;
D. Coplan, In Township Tonight! South Africa’s Black City Music and Theatre (Johannesburg, 1985);
and D. Anthony III, ‘Max Yergan in South Africa: From Evangelical Pan-Africanist to Revolutionary Socialist’, African Studies Review, 34 (1991), pp. 27–55. I have made use of some of this work in my broader comparative study, Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa (New York, 1995). This essay is adapted from Chapter 7 of that work.
G. Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an Ideology (Berkeley, 1978), pp. 273–81 and passim.
J. Lester, Look Out, Whiteyf Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama! (New York, 1968), p. 91. On earlier manifestations of African-American black nationalism, see Fredrickson, Black Liberation, Chapters 2 and 4.
The shifting attitudes in SNCC are well described and analysed in C. Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 111–211, passim. On CORE’S similar evolution toward separatism and away from nonviolence,
see A. Meier and E. Rudwick, CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942–1968 (New York, 1973), pp. 374–408.
A good account of the Meredith March can be found in Carson, In Struggle, pp. 206–11. Carmichael did not actually invent the term Black Power, even in the context of the mid-1960s. Adam Clayton Powell, for one, had used it earlier. Carmichael was not even the first to use it on the Meredith march; but his usage was the first to be widely publicized. Quote on the rejection of nonviolence is from James Boggs in F. Barbour (ed.), The Black Seventies (Boston, 1970), p. 35.
G. Wilmore and J. Cone (eds), Black Theology: A Documentary History (Maryknoll, NY, 1979), p. 27;
N. Wright, Black Power and Urban Unrest: Creative Possibilities (New York, 1967), p. 61.
Wright, Black Power and Urban Unrest, p. 7; Wright, ‘The Crisis Which Bred Black Power’, in F. Barbour (ed.), The Black Power Revolt (Boston, 1968), pp. 116–17.
S. Carmichael and C. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York, 1967), pp. 44–5.
S. Carmichael, Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism (New York, 1971), pp. 35, 97.
This discussion is based mainly on M. Marable, Race, Reform, and Revolution: The Second Reconstruction in Black America (Jackson, Miss., 1991), pp. 86–148 (quote p. 110);
J. McCartney, Black Power Ideologies: An Essay in African American Political Thought (Philadelphia, 1992);
and W.L. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement in American Culture, 1965–1975 (Chicago, 1992), pp. 112–91. Conspicuous separatists (or in Van Deburg’s terminology ‘territorial nationalists’), in addition to those named above, included the poet Imamu Amiri Baraka (Leroy Jones) and Imari Obadele I (Richard Henry), founder of a sect called the Republic of New Africa. Prominent among those that political scientist John McCartney labels ‘counter-communalists’ — but whom I prefer to call, in accordance with the terminology of the late 1960s and Van Deburg’s classifications, ‘revolutionary nationalists’ — were (in addition to Newton and other Black Panther leaders like Eldrige Cleaver) James Foreman, the former SNCC leader, and Robert Allen, author of the book that made the strongest case for a black-led revolution against American capitalism: Black Awakening in Capitalist America (New York, 1969).
On NUSAS in the 1960s, see Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa, pp. 257–9; T. Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa since 1945 (London, 1983), pp. 322–3;
and B. Hirson, Year of Fire, Year of Ash: The Soweto Revolt: Roots of a Revolution (London, 1979), pp. 65–8.
Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa, pp. 259–70; Hirson, Year of Fire, pp. 68–84; R. Fatton, Black Consciousness in South Africa: The Dialectics of Ideological Resistance to White Supremacy (Albany, 1986), pp. 63–80;
B. Pityana et al (eds), The Bounds of Possibility: The Legacy of Steve Biko and Black Consciousness (Cape Town, 1991), pp. 154–78 and passim.
Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa, pp. 288–90; A. Stubbs (ed.), Steve Biko — I Write What I Like (San Francisco, 1978), pp. 80–6 (quote on p. 86.).
The best source on the development of Black Theology is Wilmore and Cone, Black Theology: A Documentary History. Among its major expressions were A. Cleage, The Black Messiah (New York, 1968);
J. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (New York, 1969), A Black Theology of Liberation (Philadelphia, 1970), and God of the Oppressed (New York, 1972);
and G. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism (New York, 1972). A work that shows the connections between American and South African versions is
D. Hopkins, Black Theology: USA and South Africa (Maryknoll, NY, 1989).
J. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, p. 7. Buthelezi quoted in L. Kretzschmar, The Voice of Black Theology in South Africa (Johannesburg, 1986), p. 62.
Cone, Black Theology of Liberation, p. 6; Buthelezi quoted in Hopkins, Black Theology: USA and South Africa, p. 99; Cone quoted in B. Moore (ed.), The Challenge of Black Theology (Atlanta, 1973), p. 48;
A. Boesak, Farewell to Innocence: A Socio-Ethical Study of Black Theology and Black Power (Johannesburg, 1976), p. 78. For a discussion of the differences, see Kretzschmar, The Voice of Black Theology, pp. 65–8.
Stubbs, Biko — I Write What I Like, p. 69; S. Biko, Black Consciousness in South Africa (New York, 1978), p. 99.
See A. Marx, Lessons of Struggle: South African Internal Opposition, 1960–1990 (New York, 1992), pp. 39–60, 194–5; and G. Budlender, ‘Black Consciousness and the Liberal Tradition’, in Pityana, Bounds of Possibility, pp. 234–5. For a good example of white leftist criticism of BC, see Hirson, Year of Fire, passim.
Good accounts of black politics in South Africa in the 1980s can be found in Marx, Lessons of Struggle, pp. 106–234; R. Price, The Apartheid State in Crisis: Political Transformation in South Africa, 1975–1990 (New York, 1991), pp. 152–219;
and S. Mufson, The Fighting Years: Black Resistance and the Struggle for a New South Africa (Boston, 1980).
Statements of former Black Consciousness supporters who embraced non-racialism as a more advanced form of struggle can be found in J. Frederikse, The Unbreakable Thread: Non-racialism in South Africa (Bloomington, Ind., 1990), pp. 114–15, 134–5, 161–2.
For the text of McKay’s poem, as well as some commentary on it, see N. Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York, 1971), pp. 71–2. On Newton’s concept of ‘revolutionary suicide’, see McCartney, Black Power Ideologies, pp. 139–40 and Newton’s book Revolutionary Suicide (New York, 1973). Newton distinguished revolutionary suicide from ‘reactionary suicide’, the throwing away of one’s life out of despair without engaging in direct resistance to the oppressor.
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Fredrickson, G.M. (1998). Black Power in the United States and Black Consciousness in South Africa: Connections and Comparisons. In: Greenstein, R. (eds) Comparative Perspectives on South Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26252-6_6
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