Abstract
One of the curious features of African intellectual life in South Africa is, as is the case with Afro-Caribbean philosophy, “the near absence of an explicitly cultivated philosophical tradition:”1 South Africa has produced a number of internationally acclaimed African literary, social, religious, and political figures whose works are full of philosophical insights and arguments. Yet this country has apparently not produced African philosophers of the same calibre and comparable to internationally well-known African philosophers such as Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Paulin Hountondji, Kwasi Wiredu, Odera Oruka, Kwame Anthony Appiah, or V.Y. Mudimbe.
The thing about Biko that appealed to me is that he doesn’t conform to the standard Freedom Fighter image. Mandela might have been more typical but…he is very much in the tradition of Kenyatta or Nyerere, leaders of political movements. Steve Biko was much more of a philosopher.
(Richard Fawkes, cited in The Sunday Star, May 31, 1992)
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Notes
Paget Henry, Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2000), xi.
Ibid., 2.
In his classic, The African Image (1962), E’skia Mphahlele, for instance, strongly rejects Leopold Sedar Senghor’s concept of “Negritude” from a literary perspective. However, he agrees with Senghor’s philosophical interpretation of “African humanism,” a theme that occupies pride of place in his literary texts and constitutes the basis of his epistemology in his Towards a Humanistic Philosophy of Education (1982). In 1977 Mazisi Kunene gave a lengthy interview on the meaning and practice of African Philosophy in South Africa that was followed by a publication on “The Relevance of African Cosmological Systems to African Literature.” See C. Luchembe, “An Interview with Mazisi Kunene on African Philosophy,” Ufahamu 7, no. 2 (1977): 3–27, and Mazisi Kunene, “The Relevance of African Cosmological Systems to African Literature Today,” in E. D. Jones, ed., African Literature Today: Myth and History (London: Heinemann, 1980). Mathole Motshekga published a monograph entitled, An Introduction to Kara Philosophy (1983) that in a profound way anticipated Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (1987).
A substantial number of writings on Biko focus mostly on the political aspect of his thinking and a few on his thoughts on culture and politics. In this respect, see for example, Robert Fatton, Black Consciousness in South Africa (Albany, NJ: State University of New York Press, 1986); N. Barney Pityana, Mamphela Ramphele, Malusi Mpumlwana, and Lindy Wilson, eds., Bounds of Possibility: The Legacy of Steve Biko and Black Conciousness (Cape Town, SA: David Philip, 1991); C. R. D. Halisi, Black Political Thought in the Making of South African Democracy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Thomas K. Ranuga, “Frantz Fanon and Black Consciousness in Azania,” Phylon 47, no. 3 (1986): 182–191; Chris J. Nteta, “Revolutionary Self-Consciousness as an Objective Force Within the Process of Liberation” Radical America 21, no. 5 (1987): 55–61; Nigel Gibson, “Black Consciousness 1977–1987: The Dialectics of Liberation in South Africa,” Africa Today (1980): 5–26; David Hemson, “The Antimonies of Black Rage,” Alternation 2, no. 2 (1995): 184–206; Pal Ahluwalia and Abebe Zegeye, “Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko: Towards Liberation,” Social Identities 7, no. 3 (2001): 455–469.
Steve Biko, I Write What I Like: A Selection of his Writings (Randburg: Ravan Press, 1996), 92; Ranunga, “Frantz Fanon,” 186.
C. R. D. Halisi, “Biko and Black Consciousness Philosophy: An Interpretation” in N. Barney Pityana, Mamphela Ramphele, Malusi Mpumlwana, and Lindy Wilson, eds., Bounds of Possibility: The Legacy of Steve Biko and Black Consciousness (Cape Town, SA: David Philip, 1991), 100–110; Ranuga, “Frantz Fanon,” 182.
P. Ahluwalia and A. Zegeye, “Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko: Towards Liberation,” Social Identities 7, no. 3 (2001): 460.
Themba Sono, Reflections on the Origin of Black Consciousness in South Africa (Pretoria: HSRC Press, 1993), 90.
Ibid., 102.
For more on Fanon, the existential phenomenologist, see Lewis R. Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 1995); Her Majesty’s Other Children (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), especially ch. 2; Lewis R. Gordon, T. D. Sharpley-Whiting, and R. T. White, eds. Fanon: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), especially ch. 5, 8, 9, and 10.
Benita Parry, “Reconciliation and Remembrance,” Die Suid Afrikaan (February 1996): 12.
Lucius Outlaw, On Race and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1996), 76.
Ibid., 77.
Lewis R. Gordon, Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1997), 6.
For the existentialist category of “being-black-in-the-world” see, for example, Chabani Manganyi, who has over the years articulated a humanist existentialism that found its most profound expression in his seminal text, Being-Black-in-the-World (Johannesburg: Sprocas/Ravan, 1973). See also his other existentialist texts, Mashangu’s Reverie and Other Essays (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1977); Alienation and the Body in Racist Society (New York: Nok, 1977); and Looking Through the Keyhole (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1981).
Lewis R. Gordon, Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000), 8.
Steve Biko, interview with Gail M. Gerhart, Durban, October 24, 1972.
L. Turner and J. Alan, Frantz Fanon, Soweto and American Black Thought (Chicago, IL: News and Letters, 1986), 38.
Barney Pityana, 2002. “Steve Biko: An Enduring Legacy.” http://www.unisa.ac.za/contents/about/principle/docs/Biko.doc-.
Steve Biko, “I Write What I Like: By Frank Talk,” SASO Newsletter 2, no. 1 (1972): 10.
Ibid., 7.
More than Biko, Sartre’s influence on other Black Consciousness movement proponents was even more explicit and direct. A case in point is Chabani Noel Manganyi in whose work Sartre’s philosophy proliferates and is even evident in his choice of the titles of his essays. For example, his seminal text, Being-Black-in-the-World (1973) prods anyone with knowledge of existential phenomenology to Heidegger’s and Sartre’s category of “Being-in-the-world.” His subsequent text Looking Through the Keyhole (1981) clearly recalls Sartre’s famous example of a man who, driven by intense jealousy, is caught peeping through the keyhole in the section “The Look” of Being and Nothingness. Some other chapter titles with a Sartrean flavor include “Us and Them,” “Nausea,” “The Body-for-Others,” and “Alienation: The Body and Racism.” These are to be found in his other texts such as Alienation and the Body in Racist Society (1977) and Mashangu’s Reverie and Other Essays (1977). Considering himself as having been influenced by “a philosophical orientation which may be described as existential-phenomenological” (Chabani Manganyi, Alienation and the Body in Racist Society [New York: NOK, 1977], 8). The text that appears to have had the most impact on his thinking is Sartre’s Portrait of the Anti-Semite.
Lewis R. Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1995), 131.
Odera H. Oruka, Trends in Contemporary African Philosophy (Nairobi, Kenya: Shirikon, 1990), 71.
T.B. Dyrberg, The Circular Structure of Power (London: Verso, 1997), 2.
Ibid.
Biko, I Write What I Like (1996), 65.
Biko, I Write What I Like (1996), 97–98.
D. T. Goldberg, “Hate, or Power?” APA Newsletter 94, no. 2 (1995): 13.
For detailed conceptions of racism as power relations see, for example, A. Sivanandan, "Challenging Racism: Strategies for the ‘80s,’ Race and Class 26, no. 2 (1982): 1–12; A. Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (New York: Scribner, 1992); M. Marable, Speaking Truth to Power (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996); S. Carmichael and C. V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1967).
Biko, I Write What I Like (1996), 51 and 90.
Ibid., 87.
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Black Orpheus,” in John MacCombie, trans., “What Is Literature?” And Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 296.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. C. L. Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967), 135.
E. A. Ruch and K. C. Anyanwu, African Philosophy (Rome: Catholic Book Agency, 1981), 201. Besides the obvious inaccuracy of the claim, “showing by all means at their disposal that they themselves and not their oppressors are in fact the superior beings,” a distinction rarely made by most people like Ruch, is the one between “racism” and “racialism.” (For similar distinction between racism and racialism see Albert Mosley, African Philosophy: Selected Readings [Englewood Cliff, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995], 216–235; Alain de Benoist, “What is Racism?” Telos 114 [1999]: 11–49; Lucius T. Outlaw, On Race and Philosophy [New York: Routledge, 1996], 8 and 18.) These are often conflated to mean one thing, namely, the belief that one’s race is superior to others and, therefore, has the right to dominate others. The two are however distinct and do not necessarily entail each other. A racialist believes in the existence of races and that these races are different, both physiologically and even behaviorally. Racialism by itself does not posit racial hierarchical value judgments about one race or another. It limits itself merely to distinguishing between races without attribution of negative or positive valuations. In this sense, racialism is not necessarily, certainly not always practically, pernicious and to be opposed automatically. Even Appiah, a great opponent of the concept of race acknowledges that “Racialism is not, in itself, a doctrine that must be dangerous.” (A. K. Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992], 13.)
J. L. A. Garcia, “‘Current Conceptions of Racism’: A Critical Examination of Some Recent Social Philosophy,” Journal of Social Philosophy 28, no. 2 (1997): 13.
Margaret Mead and James Baldwin, A Rap on Race (London: Michael Joseph, 1971), 21. Emphasis Added.
B. Langa, ed., SASO on the Attack: An Introduction to the South African Student Organisation (Durban, SA: SASO, 1973), 9.
William R. Jones, “The Legitimacy and Necessity of Black Philosophy: Some Preliminary. Considerations,” The Philosophical Forum 9, nos. 2–3 (1977–1978): 53.
Biko, I Write What I Like (1996), 48.
Ibid., 25.
Ibid., 97.
For different kinds of separatists, see Howard McGary, “Racial Integration and Racial Separatism: Conceptual Clarifications,” in Leonard Harris, ed., Philosophy Born of Struggle (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1983).
Biko, I Write What I Like (1996), 90.
Ibid., 20.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Portrait of the Anti-Semite, trans. Erik de Mauny (London: Secker and Warburg, 1948), 46.
Biko, I Write What I Like (1996), 64.
Amiri Baraka and Moulana Karenga, quoted in Harris, Philosophy Born of Struggle, 202.
Biko, I Write What I Like (1996), 21.
Ibid.
Biko, I Write What I Like (1996), 100.
Ibid., 101.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956).
Biko, I Write What I Like (1996), 28.
Ibid.
Ibid., 100.
Ibid., 131.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 317.
For interesting discussions of this attitude and events involving them see, for example, George Yancy, ed., What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question (New York: Routledge, 2004), especially the intro. and ch. 2 and 6; George Yancy, ed., African-American Philosophers: 17 Conversations (New York: Routledge, 1998); Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Charles W. Mills, Blackness Invisible (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). On the marginalization of “race” as a legitimate philosophical concern see, for example, Jones, “The Legitimacy and Necessity,” 149–160 or Outlaw, On Race and Philosophy.
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© 2008 Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander, and Nigel C. Gibson
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More, M.P. (2008). Biko: Africana Existentialist Philosopher. In: Mngxitama, A., Alexander, A., Gibson, N.C. (eds) Biko Lives!. Contemporary Black History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230613379_3
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