Abstract
This article was written in 1988 as an attempt to understand what had happened to Black Consciousness (BC) as an ideological force ten years after Steve Biko’s death. As a young anti-Stalinist, anti-apartheid activist in London in the late 1970s I had been energized by the June 16, 1976 Soweto revolt but disgusted by the mainstream anti-apartheid movement’s dismissal of Black Consciousness. At the time I was impressed by an important pamphlet written by John Alan and Lou Turner, Frantz Fanon, Soweto and American Black Thought,1 which articulated the importance of Fanon to Biko’s thought and considered Black Consciousness a new stage of cognition. Like Biko, they considered the Soweto revolt as a concrete expression of that new stage and underscored the importance of revolutionary humanism in Biko’s and Fanon’s thought.2
It so happens that the unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps.
(Frantz Fanon, “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness”)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
John Alan and Lou Turner, Frantz Fanon, Soweto and American Black Thought (Detroit: News and Letters, 1978; Chicago: 1986). The section on Fanon was reprinted in my Rethinking Fanon (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999).
For a recent discussion of “revolutionary humanism” in Fanon’s thought, see Richard Pithouse, “‘That the Tool Never Possess the Man’: Taking Fanon’s Humanism Seriously,” Politikon 30, no. 2 (2003): 107–131.
This is a term I use in “Fanon’s Humanism and Africa Today,” in Eileen McCarthy-Arnold, David Penna, and Joy Cruz Sobrepena, eds., Africa, Human Rights and the Global System: The Political Economy of Human Rights in a Changing World (Boulder CO: Greenwood Press, 1994), 23–36.
H. S. Harris, Hegel: Phenomenology and System (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1995): 107.
Raya Dunayevskaya, Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre and From Marx to Mao (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 93.
Ibid., xliii.
See Nigel Gibson “Transition from Apartheid,” Journal of Asian and Asian Studies 36, no. 1 (2001): 65–85, and “The Pitfalls of South Africa’s Liberation,” New Political Science 23 (2001): 371–386.
Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 445. It shouldn’t be forgotten that Gramsci (perhaps this was a historic barrier) was unable to shed his concept of a vanguard party despite his notion of historical materialism as an “absolute humanism.”
Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution (New York: Grove, 1967), 181.
John Brewer, After Soweto: An Unfinished Journey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), ch. 4. This is somewhat ironic as the ANC and UDF are nationalist and populist rather than working class parties.
This point is made by Mbulelo Vizikhungo Mzamane in his “Steve Biko Memorial Address,” printed in Solidarity (Official organ of the BCMA), no. 7 (1981): 8.
Itumeleng Mosala and Buti Tlhangle, The Unquestionable Right to Be Free: Black Theology From South Africa (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1986), 13.
Heribert Adam, “The Rise of Black Consciousness in South Africa,” Race 15, no. 2 (October 1973): 155.
Bernard Zylstra interview with Steve Biko, published in The Reform Journal (Michigan) December 1977 and “The Definition of Black Consciousness” in Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like (London: Heineman, 1979), 51.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 7,8, and 222.
(Eds. Note: The following section on Fanon has been cut from the original article. Readers may want to consult Nigel C. Gibson’s, Fanon: A Postcolonial Imagination [Polity Press, 2003]). Many have reduced Fanon to an “apostle of violent revolution.” One only has to look at the writings of some of the leaders of the American Black Power movement to find this. Even Robert Fatton in Black Consciousness in South Africa, the Dialectics of Ideological Resistance to White Supremacy (Albany, NJ: SUNY Press, 1986) reduces Fanon to the “terrorist acts of POQO” (the Pan Africanist Congress’ military wing), see 24–26. What Biko found in Fanon is never mentioned. In contrast, Sam Noluntshugu in Changing South Africa: Political Considerations (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1982) writes: “Although Fanon’s writings were read widely and his ideas of alienation in colonial society had much influence on many theorists of black consciousness there is little evidence that his ideas on violence were much discussed.”
AZASO is no longer in the BC camp. It defected to the Charterists in 1981 after Curtis Nkondo was suspended from his post as president of AZAPO when he tried to lead the organization in the charterist camp. In late 1986 it dropped the title “Azanian,” renaming itself the South African National Students’ Congress. It now views “the system of exploitation of man by man and not … whites as such” as the main “cause of black oppression in South Africa.” COSAS, founded in 1979, “stood in conscious opposition to those organisations which claim to be inspired by black consciousness.” (See James Leatt, Theo Kneifel, and Klaus Nurnburger, eds., Contending ldeologies in South Africa [Cape Town, SA: David Phillip, 1986], 116.) In 1980 COSAS declared its support for the Freedom Charter and sees its role as students “to support the struggles of workers.” It is ironic that both these organizations, which identify with the black working class, should also take into their programs the Freedom Charter. The Azanian Students Movement was formed in 1982 to replace AZASO as a student organization grounded in black consciousness principles; it also sees itself as an organization linked to workers’ struggles.
This was asserted in a 1981 AZAPO Conference paper, quoted in Tom Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa Since 1945 (Essex, UK: Longman, 1983), 345.
See, Graham Leach, South Africa (London: BBC Publications, 1986) and Heribert Adam and Kogila Moodley, South Africa WithoutApartheid, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), 97.
In his book One Azania, One Nation, written under the pseudonym No Sizwe (London: Zed Press, 1979).
Baruch Hirson, Year of Fire, Year of Ash (London: Zed Press, 1979), 328.
See Raya Dunayevaskya, “The Cuban Revolution: The Year After” in News and Letters, December 1960.
Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 165 and 183–184.
Tabata’s opening address to the first conference of the Society of Young Africa on December 20, 1951, in From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in SouthAfrica, 1882–1964, ed. Thomas Karis and Gwendolen Carter (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1973), document 98.
Motgethi Motlhabi, The Theory and Practice ofBlack Resistance to Apartheid: A Social-Ethical Analysis (Braamfontein, SA: Skotaville Publishers, 1984), 274.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2008 Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander, and Nigel C. Gibson
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gibson, N.C. (2008). Black Consciousness after Biko: The Dialectics of Liberation in South Africa, 1977–1987. In: Mngxitama, A., Alexander, A., Gibson, N.C. (eds) Biko Lives!. Contemporary Black History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230613379_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230613379_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-0-230-60649-4
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-61337-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)