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HSTORY T2 Gr. 12 Black Consciousness Essay

Grade 12: The Challenge of Black Consciousness to the Apartheid State (Essay) PPT

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Steve biko and the black consciousness movement.

Leslie Anne Hadfield Leslie Anne Hadfield Department of History, Brigham Young University
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.83
Published online: 27 February 2017

The Black Consciousness movement of South Africa instigated a social, cultural, and political awakening in the country in the 1970s. By the mid-1960s, major anti-apartheid organizations in South Africa such as the African National Congress and Pan-Africanist Congress had been virtually silenced by government repression. In 1969, Steve Biko and other black students frustrated with white leadership in multi-racial student organizations formed an exclusively black association. Out of the South African Students’ Organization (SASO) came what was termed Black Consciousness. This philosophy redefined “black” as an inclusive, positive identity and taught that black South Africans could make meaningful change in their society if “conscientized” or awakened to their self-worth and the need for activism. The movement emboldened youth, contributed to the development of Black Theology and cultural movements, and led to the formation of new community and political organizations such as the Black Community Programs organization and the Black People’s Convention.

Articulate and charismatic, Steve Biko was one of the movement’s foremost instigators and prolific writers. When the South African government understood the threat Black Consciousness posed to apartheid, it worked to silence the movement and its leaders. Biko was banished to his home district in the Eastern Cape, where he continued to build community development programs and have a strong political influence. His death at the hands of security police in September 1977 revealed the brutality of South African security forces and the extent to which the state would go to maintain white supremacy. After Biko’s death, the state declared Black Consciousness–related organizations illegal. Activists formed the Azanian People’s Organization (AZAPO) in 1978 to carry on Black Consciousness ideals, though the movement in general waned after Biko’s death. Since then, Biko has loomed over the history of the Black Consciousness movement as a powerful icon and celebrated hero while others have looked to Black Consciousness in forging a new black future for South Africa.

Black Consciousness
South African Student’s Organization
liberation movements

The Rise of Black Consciousness

The Black Consciousness movement became one of the most influential anti-apartheid movements of the 1970s in South Africa. While many parts of the African continent gained independence, the apartheid state increased its repression of black liberation movements in the 1960s. In the latter part of the decade, the major anti-apartheid organizations worked underground or in exile. The state also increased its extra-legal tactics of intimidation, silencing some activists by kidnapping or killing them. This state action crippled anti-apartheid activity and instilled a sense of fear in the larger black community. The state also began creating so-called homelands—small reserves intended to become independent countries for specific ethnic groups to curb black political opposition and urbanization while retaining access to black labor. All of this perpetuated deep-seated cultural racism in South Africa.

As state repression increased, universities and churches tended to have greater freedom to speak out against the government and facilitated the sharing of ideas. The 1960s saw an increase in Christian social movements and growing opposition to apartheid in churches and ecumenical organizations. Both economic prosperity and greater government control led to higher numbers of black students in primary and secondary schools and the expansion of black universities, segregated according to ethnicity. Although apartheid education restricted black aspirations, these schools also became places of politicization where black students could come together and share ideas and experiences. These elements along with the daily experiences and interpretations of individuals who made up the Black Consciousness movement all contributed to its growth. As emerging young adults unencumbered by the fear of older generations, these activists looked for a way to fundamentally change their society. They did this first by targeting the mind of black people in South Africa. But the movement was also about immediate and relevant action that would make South Africans self-reliant. In other words, it sought a full liberation of black South Africans by starting at the level of the individual, an approach not overtly political to begin with.

SASO and Black Consciousness

The beginning of the movement is marked by the formation of the South African Students’ Organization (SASO), officially launched in July 1969 . Black students at various universities, especially at the University of Natal Medical School–Black Section (UNB), the University of Fort Hare, and the University of the North at Turfloop, became increasingly frustrated with the limits of white student leadership in multiracial organizations. At a National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) meeting held in Grahamstown in 1967 and a University Christian Movement (UCM) conference in Stutterheim in July 1968 , the mostly white leadership would not act decisively to challenge the enforced racial segregation of accommodations for the students at the conference. Led primarily by Steve Biko and Barney Pityana, black students decided to form an exclusively black organization to more effectively advance the cause of the oppressed in South Africa.

SASO laid the foundation for what would grow beyond universities and student groups to become a wider movement. It was in SASO that activists formulated the Black Consciousness philosophy. SASO students also started engaging in community development programs and artistic and literary production and eventually moved into political defiance against the state.

Members of SASO as university students had access to a number of different ideas and engaged with each other—students who came to universities with diverse backgrounds, but similar experiences. They also had access to news media and reading materials through student-activist networks. As they debated and read materials from various parts of Africa and the African diaspora, these students formulated what they began to call Black Consciousness. In addition to the influences of various South African perspectives and their experience in student politics, a number of philosophers and leaders from the African continent and the African diaspora helped shape their thinking. Daniel Magaziner described them as “autonomous shoppers in the marketplace of ideas.” 1 SASO students studied Franz Fanon’s analysis of the psychological impact of colonialism, Jean-Paul Sartre’s dialectical analysis, Zambia’s K. K. Kaunda’s African humanism, and Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere’s version of African socialism that emphasized self-reliance and development for liberation. They also read from black American authors, particularly identifying with the Black Power movement (even adopting the raised fist as a gesture of black pride in South Africa) and analyzing the Black Theology of James Cone. SASO students also drew upon the writings of Brazil’s educationalist, Paulo Freire, from which they derived the idea of “to conscientize”—to awaken people to a critical awareness of their situation and their ability to change their situation.

Black Consciousness began to be defined as “an attitude of mind” or “way of life” of black people who believed in their potential and value as black people and saw the need for black people to work together for a holistic liberation. SASO students explained South Africa’s main problem as twofold: white racism and black acquiescence to that racism. They felt that in general, black people had accepted their own inferiority in society. Without a positive, creative sense of self, black people would not challenge the status quo. “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor [was] the mind of the oppressed,” Biko argued. 2 Thus, Black Consciousness activists worked to change the black mindset, to look inward to build black capacity to realize their own liberation. Biko wrote that colonialism, missionaries, and apartheid had made the black man “a shell, a shadow of man, completely defeated, drowning in his own misery, a slave, an ox bearing the yoke of oppression with sheepish timidity.” He continued:

This is the first truth, bitter as it may seem, that we have to acknowledge before we can start on any programme [ sic ] designed to change the status quo…. The first step therefore is to make the black man come to himself; to pump back life into his empty shell; to infuse him with pride and dignity, to remind him of his complicity in the crime of allowing himself to be misused and therefore letting evil reign supreme in the country of his birth. 3

In affecting a black psychological, social, economic, and even spiritual liberation, activists saw two aspects as vitally important. First, they defined black as a new positive definition that included all people of color discriminated against by the color of their skin. This was a new approach to grouping people divided into apartheid into Coloureds (mixed-race people), Indians, and various black African ethnic groups. They wanted to make South Africa African in the end (though they had a vaguely defined future) but used a political definition of black that referred to a shared experience and outlook that was more cosmopolitan in celebrating black values and culture. A positive black identity would increase black people’s faith in their own potential. Black unity also presented a stronger front against apartheid. SASO came to strongly reject the participation of black South Africans in any apartheid institution that emphasized ethnic separation (including the so-called African homelands). Second, Black Consciousness activists rejected white liberals (whom they defined as any white person seeking to oppose apartheid). They saw white leadership as an obstacle to black liberation because it stifled black leadership and psychological development. As black people understood fully the oppression they experienced firsthand, activists believed they had the insights and knowledge to know what needed to change. White leadership would hinder the development of a truly self-reliant, black society. The phrase “Black man you are on your own” became a slogan of the movement. For many people, including white liberals, this came across as abrasive and startling. Some even accused SASO of promoting reverse racism. For others, it led to a refreshing, emboldened new consciousness.

SASO began with a few black students who worked to recruit other students across black campuses. This was not always easy, but strongholds developed at the University of the North, Zululand, Fort Hare, the Western Cape, and in Durban. SASO students in these various universities traveled around trying to prompt a psychological change among blacks in a number of ways. From the beginning of SASO, students engaged in community work. This began as a way to relieve the suffering of black people in poverty. Yet community projects were also seen as a way to uplift black communities psychologically as well as to improve black self-reliance. Each campus group ran projects in neighboring communities, such as volunteering in local clinics, helping to secure a clean water supply, and running education and literacy programs. The students learned from their experiences and drew upon the methodologies of Freire in particular to help them refine this work.

SASO also spread Black Consciousness through the SASO Newsletter , wherein activists described their philosophy, shared news, and dealt with the nature of their oppression. Asserting the right to speak was important for these activists and they claimed this right in the newsletter, along with other literary forms such as poems and plays. The newsletter also reported on various student meetings where students developed their thinking, debated strategies for the future, and discussed how to engage with the broader community. So-called formation schools—weekend or holiday camps—served as training grounds where students debated societal issues and learned organizational strategies. Acutely aware of the politically hostile environment within which it worked, SASO made it a point to train a number of layers of leadership to ensure the organization would continue if state repression were to hit.

A marker of the “attitude” and “way of life” of Black Consciousness activists was the way they carried themselves. The clothes they wore, their demeanor when interacting with white people, and the music they listened to all portrayed confidence and pride in blackness. The young women involved in the Black Consciousness especially challenged the status quo with new styles by throwing away their skin-lightening creams and wigs and wearing their hair in natural Afros. They also wore bold styles in clothing that pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable at the time, such as very tight pants. Some even smoked cigarettes in public. Though female students were involved in the movement from the beginning—prominent SASO women include Vuyelwa Mashalaba, Deborah Matshoba, Daphne Matshoba, Lindelwe Mabandla, Mamphela Ramphele, Thenjiwe Mthintso—the movement was dominated by male students. Women’s issues were tabled in favor of focusing on black liberation. Female activists had to excel at male ways of debating to gain an influence in SASO. The students also held parties where young women were treated more as objects of sexual desire. For some, this means that women had more conservative roles in the movement; however, some women did gain leadership in the movement, especially in community projects where they challenged conventional gender roles.

The Broader Movement

Before the state took action to suppress Black Consciousness, its influence had expanded beyond university campuses. With the spread of ideas and expansion of organizations linked to Black Consciousness, what began as a student organization grew into a movement with a broad, diffused impact that can be difficult to generalize about or trace precisely.

Cultural Movement

The movement had cultural dimensions, linked in varying degrees to formal organizations. Black Consciousness ideas resonated with poets and theater groups in particular. Some worked directly with SASO. For example, a group of black students and actors from Durban, many of Indian descent, performed their plays at SASO events (these activists formed the Theatre Council of Natal or TECON as well as the South African Black Theatre Union or SABTU). Their plays, such as Black on White and Resurrection , examined what it meant to be black and oppressed in South Africa. Participants and playwrights such as Asha Rambally Moodley and Strinivasa Moodley joined Black Consciousness organizations, while others simply continued to use theater as a way to raise a critical awareness among black communities. Poets such as Oswald Mtshali, Mongane Wally Serote, Don Mattera, Mafika Pascal Gwala, and James Matthews, among others, similarly dealt with black oppression and sought to inspire hope in black self-determination with positive images and themes of resistance and redemption. Black Consciousness promoted music with black themes and origins and influenced the outlook and material in Sowetan literary magazines, such as The Classic , New Classic , and Staffrider . 4 As Mbulelo Mzamane has argued, Black Consciousness effectively used culture as a form of affecting a black awakening and resisting white supremacy in an oppressive political climate. 5

Black Theology

Black Consciousness also contributed to the development of Black Theology in South Africa. Ecumenical organizations, Christian activists, and Black Consciousness adherents all influenced each other. The University Christian Movement (UCM) established a project spearheaded by Sabelo Stanley Ntwasa on Black Theology coming from the United States—an interpretation of Christianity that taught that Christ came to liberate the poor and oppressed, the black populations in the United States and South Africa. SASO joined the UCM in engaging Black Theology in the South African context and resolved to influence a change in leadership in South African churches. SASO and other Black Consciousness organizations supported conferences focused on examining Christianity’s relevancy to black South Africans. 6 A number of those influenced by Black Theology later became leaders of Christian resistance and contextual theology, such as Alphaeus Zulu, Manas Buthelezi, Desmond Tutu, Allan Boesak, and Frank Chikane. Activists worked closely with radical priests and ecumenical organizations, significantly putting these Christian ideals into action. 7

Black Community Programs

In September of 1971 , the Christian Institute and the South African Council of Churches appointed Bennie Khoapa as the director of a division of their Special Project on Christian Action in Society (Spro-cas 2). As the head of the Black Community Programs (BCP), Khoapa combined Christian action with the Black Consciousness philosophy. The organization sought to coordinate among other agencies run by and in the black community and to conscientize black South Africans through publication projects that provided relevant news for black people and promoted a positive black identity. The BCP eventually moved to run its own projects when activists working for the organization found themselves restricted to their home areas by banning orders in 1973 . For example, it ran health clinics such as the Zanempilo Community Health Center in the Eastern Cape, managed cottage industries like the Njwaxa leatherwork factory also in the Eastern Cape, and opened resource centers at its regional offices. It published a yearbook, Black Review . The BCP gave practical expression to Black Consciousness ideals. BCP publications encouraged black publishing in South Africa and became a trusted source of positive information in black communities. Research in villages where the BCP ran its projects has demonstrated that health and economic projects in the Eastern Cape improved black people’s physical conditions and helped villagers gain a greater sense of human dignity. Through this work, the BCP also significantly addressed women’s issues and female activists proved themselves as capable leaders and respected colleagues. 8

The Black People’s Convention

At the same time that some activists saw community and cultural work as essential for reaching their goals, others advocated for a national organization to push for more immediate political change. This led to the formation of the Black People’s Convention (BPC). In 1971 at meetings of various black agencies to discuss the formation of a national coordinating organization (including the Interdenominational African Ministers’ Association and the Association for the Educational and Cultural Advancement of the African People), proponents of establishing an overtly political organization (such as Aubrey Mokoape and Harry Nengwekhulu) gained a majority over those who saw community development as a more sure way of building up strength for future political work. The BPC was launched in July 1972 and held its first national conference in December, where Winifred Kgware was elected as one its first president. The principal aim of the BPC was defined as fostering black political unity in the Black Consciousness sense in order to achieve psychological and physical liberation. This included creating an egalitarian society, developing Black Theology, and condemning foreign countries working with the apartheid government, among other objectives. The BPC was the first black national political organization formed since 1960 and took a strong stance of non-participation in the apartheid system. Membership did not grow as rapidly or as widely as the BPC hoped. By the end of 1973 , the BPC had forty-one branches. Still, the BPC helped organize the pro-FRELIMO rallies and continued to refine its future vision for South Africa, including the much debated Mafeking Manifesto that outlined a specific mixed-economy future for South Africa. 9

Youth and Leadership

Activists also influenced high school students and the development of youth movements, directly and indirectly. SASO and the BCP held youth leadership conferences or formation schools that engaged students in critical social analysis and taught organizational skills. These meetings eventually led to the formation of regional youth organizations and the National Youth Organization (NYO, formed in 1973 ). In Soweto, where student organizations had already been operating, SASO students and events in general helped spread Black Consciousness among high school students. SASO leader Onkgopotse Abraham Tiro, expelled from the University of the North, and other SASO students ended up teaching in high schools in Soweto. The already existing African Student Movement changed its name to the South African Student Movement (SASM), to be more inclusive. It was SASM that organized the June 16, 1976 , Soweto student march against the use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction that led to widespread uprisings. Although the Black Consciousness movement cannot claim credit for orchestrating the Soweto Uprisings, the movement’s bold assertion of black self-worth and self-reliance clearly influenced high school students, and SASM aligned itself to Black Consciousness organizations. The student uprisings of 1976 , along with other adult leaders who became involved in running community programs in Soweto (such as Ramsey Ramokgopa and Oshadi Mangena), are evidence of the way Black Consciousness ideas changed South African thinking among different groups of people in various corners of the country. 10

Clashes with the State

State repression profoundly shaped the context and direction of the Black Consciousness movement. Aware of the way the state cracked down on resistance in the early 1960s, SASO leaders deliberately avoided confrontation with the state in order to evade crippling state action. Still, activists took care to nurture leadership so that replacements were ready to fill in positions if the police detained people in leadership roles. Initially, the state saw the formation of an exclusively black student organization as fitting with apartheid. However, it soon understood that Black Consciousness undermined the whole philosophy behind apartheid and increasingly bore down on the movement and its leaders. The state’s efforts to silence activists included bans on individuals (legal orders that restricted a person’s movement, political involvement, and public presence), numerous detentions without trial (for up to 180 days at times), and constant police surveillance and intimidation. Activists learned to outwit the police. Their youthful energy and audacity sustained their activity in this politically hostile environment. They also found hope in suffering at the hands of the state because they viewed it as a sacrifice that advanced South Africa closer to liberation. 11

Confrontation with the state escalated first in 1972 , when Tiro, the Student Representative Council president at the University of the North, gave a speech criticizing the university’s white leadership and the racial discrimination infused in its education. The university expelled Tiro. This sparked a number of black student strikes across the country. Many of these students were in turn expelled and at the beginning of 1973 ; the state placed banning orders on a number of SASO leaders including Biko, Pityana, Nengwekhulu, Saths Cooper, Strini Moodley, and Bokwe Mafuna. This scattered activists throughout the country, although they found ways to continue their work.

State repression of Black Consciousness activists intensified in the next few years, especially as activists took more overt action against the state. A particularly important move in this direction was the pro-FRELIMO rallies held at the University of the North and in Durban in September 1974 to celebrate the liberation of a neighboring country from European colonialism and express their support for the people of Mozambique. The minister of justice declared the rallies illegal just before they were to take place. The leaders of SASO and the BPC decided to go through with their original plans, even if it meant violent clashes with police. Police did indeed break up the rallies using some violence. This led to further arrests and detentions of activists and a publicized court case that essentially put Black Consciousness on trial ( State v. Cooper et al., also known as the SASO-BPC trial). Nine men were tried and convicted of encouraging racial hostility. 12 Even if not all Black Consciousness activists agreed with the way the rallies were held, this move marked them more firmly as enemies of the state and gave the movement a more public place in anti-apartheid politics.

Police harassment, detentions, and bannings spiked again after the 1976 student uprisings and continued into 1977 . This took a toll on the lives of many activists. Detentions put a psychological strain on individuals and their families, and increasingly brutal torture inflicted physical damage. Four Black Consciousness activists died between 1972 and 1977 as a result of the actions of South African security forces: Mthuli ka Shezi was pushed onto a train track in 1972 , Tiro was letter-bombed in Botswana in 1974 , Mapetla Mohapi (SASO organizer) was killed in the Kei Road police station in 1976 , and Biko died at the hands of the security police in 1977 .

Bantu Stephen Biko, the most prominent figure of the Black Consciousness movement, was not the only student, thinker, writer, and community project director in the movement, but he did play a significant role in forming SASO, spreading the Black Consciousness philosophy, and running and advising the BPC, among other informal roles. His charismatic personality drew people to him. His death at the hands of the South African security police thus had significant repercussions for the Black Consciousness movement and made him a famous martyr.

Born at Tarkastad on December 18, 1946 , to Mzingaye and Alice Duna Biko, Biko grew up in Ginsberg (a small township of King William’s Town in the Eastern Cape). Biko’s father was a policeman (studying for a law degree by correspondence) until he died of an illness in 1950 . Biko’s mother subsequently supported her four children—Bukelwa, Khaya, Bantu, and Nobandile—by working as a domestic maid, then a cook at Grey Hospital in King William’s Town. Biko’s mother was a committed Christian and was often remembered for the way she helped people in need in the township or people in transit at the train station nearby. This kind of community involvement and devotion influenced each of her children in their chosen professions later in life.

The Ginsberg community was a small but racially and economically diverse and vibrant community in the 1950s and 1960s. Biko lived with Coloured neighbors, and Ginsberg’s Weir Hall hosted a number of musical events. There were also a number of sports clubs. Although the community had politically involved people, Biko himself was not interested in politics as a young boy. His siblings, friends, and classmates remember him as being a highly capable student but one who was very playful and sociable. His academic achievements won him support from his community, which organized a bursary for him to join his older brother at the Lovedale Institution to finish high school when he was sixteen years old. His brother’s political activities with the Pan Africanist Congress led to his detention and then expulsion from Lovedale in 1963 . This experience politicized Biko. He resented the abuse of authority by the police, especially as he thought about his brother’s experience. His schooling had also been interrupted, leaving him at home to think while his peers busied themselves with school work. In 1964 , he continued his schooling at St. Francis College, a Roman Catholic school in Mariannhill in the then Natal province. There he further distinguished himself as an outstanding student and questioned authorities and their Christian beliefs. He also held stimulating intellectual debates about African independence with other students.

Biko’s scholastic achievements won him a spot at the UNB medical school, the only place where black people could study medicine during apartheid. There Steve interacted with black people of various backgrounds and began to play a role in student politics at the university. He joined NUSAS and also interacted with the UCM. It is through these student networks that he began working with other students such as Pityana to start SASO. He traveled around the country with Pityana and others to persuade students at black colleges and universities to join SASO and to explain the Black Consciousness philosophy. He served as SASO’s first president. His room at the medical school residency served as the SASO office. After one year in office, SASO elected Pityana as president and Biko took the role of publications officer. Using the pseudonym Frank Talk, he instituted a series in SASO’s newsletter entitled, “I Write What I Like,” where he tackled a number of issues and explained Black Consciousness. Former friends and activists remember Biko as one who enabled others, rather than seeking leadership roles. He also continued to find joy in his associations with people—of all racial backgrounds—mixing intellectual and political conversations with his socializing. He was known for his demanding work ethic as well as his ability to hold his drink.

During his time in Durban he met and married a nursing student, Nontsikelelo (Ntsiki) Mashalaba, with whom he had two sons, Nkosinathi (b. 1971 ) and Samora (b. 1975 ). Biko loved his family and spending time with his children; however, he did not put boundaries on his romantic and sexual relationships with women. It was also during his time in Durban that Biko met and worked with Ramphele, with whom he had a long-standing affair. He and Ramphele had a daughter, Lerato (who lived for two months in 1974 ), and a son, Hlumelo (b. 1978 ). Biko had affairs with a number of other women as well. One, Lorrain Tabane, gave birth to Biko’s daughter Motlatsi (b. 1977 ). Although their student days were marked by parties with women and drinking, a number of Biko’s friends later confronted him about his womanizing, as did his wife and Ramphele. Yet Biko seems to have been unwilling or unable to resolve the controversies and pain he caused through this behavior before his death. While he worked well with many women as colleagues and fellow activists, he at times struggled to concede that traditional gender roles could change. 13

In 1972 , Biko was expelled from medical school and left to find a way to support his young son and wife (who was also fired because of her husband’s political involvement). This led to his employment by Khoapa as a field officer for the BCP, his only official employment ever. In Durban, he worked on coordinating among various black organizations and on producing the Black Review . In 1973 , his banning sent him back to Ginsberg. This changed his work and the direction of the BCP. He set up an Eastern Cape branch of the BCP in King William’s Town, from where he helped establish the Zanempilo clinic, took over the Njwaxa project, ran the BCP office and resource center, continued to assist with publications, and started other bursary and grocery coop programs in Ginsberg. He also continued to be involved politically, despite constant police surveillance and attempts to arrest and detain him, and started studying for a law degree by correspondence. Even when he was further restricted by the government from working officially for the BCP in 1975 , he continued to advise on the projects and political matters. The BPC even elected him as an honorary president in 1977 to give him authority to cultivate unity among the various black political groups in the country at the time. Working against the apartheid security forces was a challenge, especially when Biko felt isolated and watched his fellow activists and friends suffer. But Biko also found ways to circumvent police surveillance and to challenge their authority. He was detained, arrested, and accused several times (though never convicted). He was also called to testify at the SASO-BPC trial, which gave him a public platform to define Black Consciousness and display his debating skills. He also famously befriended Donald Woods, the white East London Daily Dispatch newspaper editor, which gave the movement inroads into the media and other networks.

Biko continued to work on unifying the various black groups even under his banning orders. The last trip he took outside of his restricted banning area led him to Cape Town with fellow activist Peter Jones on August 17, 1977 , to meet with various people including Black Consciousness activists as well as Neville Alexander of the Unity Movement. The meetings never materialized. Fearing negative repercussions if they stayed too long, Jones and Biko turned back the next day. They were stopped at a roadblock just outside of Grahamstown. A problem with opening the trunk of the car they had borrowed made the police suspicious. When the police found out they had detained two leaders of the Black Consciousness movement, they arrested the two and sent them to security police headquarters in Port Elizabeth. Biko and Jones suffered physical torture at the hands of the security police.

On September 6, the police took their physical beatings of Biko too far. Police testimonies indicate that Biko’s refusal to submit to disrespectful treatment led the police to beat him and run him into the wall. Biko collapsed. Instead of providing medical treatment, the police chained him to a gate in a standing position. They only called in a district surgeon the next day. Despite evidence of brain damage, the police kept Biko naked and chained up in his cell until his conditioned worsened. On September, the police loaded Biko naked into the back of a police van and drove him through the night to Pretoria Central Prison for medical care. He was pronounced dead there on September 12, 1977 .

The announcement of Biko’s death sparked an international outcry. At first the government said Biko had died of a hunger strike. However, evidence from a postmortem examination proved that Biko had died of head injuries. An inquest into the death of Biko was held, but no one was convicted. Later evidence showed that the police and the medical professionals involved lied at the inquest about the timing of the care Biko received and the cause of the nature of the physical scuffle that led to Biko’s death. When the case was brought to the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the hearings shed further light on the physical struggle that led to Biko’s death and the medical doctors’ complicity but left members of the Biko family dissatisfied with the police officers’ disclosure. The TRC denied amnesty to all of the police officers involved in the hearings. Biko’s death remains a poignant example of the brutality and dishonesty of government security forces as well as the medical sector during apartheid.

Thousands of people attended Biko’s funeral in King William’s Town. A few weeks later, the government banned all Black Consciousness–related organizations including SASO, the BCP, the BPC, and other sympathetic organizations, newspapers, and individuals. Because of Biko’s role in the Black Consciousness movement and the nature of his death, he became the movement’s main martyr. This has influenced the way in which he has been celebrated and remembered. Biko is often placed at the center of histories of the Black Consciousness movement. He was one of the first liberation movement heroes to be memorialized in the post-apartheid era with a statue, his gravesite, and his home being dedicated in 1997 , the 20th anniversary of his death. Soon afterwards, his widow and oldest son, Nkosinathi, formed the Steve Biko Foundation, which contributes to the celebration and shaping of Biko’s character. Yet many have claimed Biko as a progenitor or hero. Community members, people involved in the projects he ran, his friends and colleagues, political parties, and public intellectuals look to Biko. Almost all remember his good characteristics (although his peers are more willing to recognize his faults). He is particularly seen as someone who sacrificed for the nation when in the post-apartheid period leaders from liberation movements are charged with corruption and self-serving politics. He has also been elevated as a leading intellectual and political activist, someone who spoke out boldly and affirmed black dignity. For some, he stands as a revolutionary, while others see him as entrenched in community work.

Post-1977 Black Consciousness Directions

The apartheid state dealt a heavy blow to the Black Consciousness movement after Biko’s death when it declared all Black Consciousness–related organizations illegal. However, activists regrouped in various ways to continue their work. As Mbulelo Mzamane, Bavusile Maaba, and Nkosinathi Biko wrote, different views about the end goal of Black Consciousness manifested themselves in the directions activists took after 1977 . 14 Some continued with community development projects as a practical way of advancing the material position of black people while also improving black self-perceptions. For example, Malusi and Thoko Mpumlwana started the Zingisa Education Fund in the place of the Ginsberg Education Fund and later established the Trust for Christian Outreach and Education (an umbrella for other community development organizations). Ramphele established the Ithuseng Community Health Centre in Tzaneen, where she had been banned, based on the Zanempilo Community Health Centre model.

On the other hand, disagreements already stirring in the movement surfaced about what kind of action would move South Africa closer to freedom and the validity of an analysis that saw economic class as the main cause of inequality. Those advocating a more direct confrontation with the state had already begun to join armed organizations outside the country. Other activists still in the country saw an above-ground political organization as the best way to embody Black Consciousness and affect change. In 1978 , a group of activists met in Roodepoort to form the Azanian People’s Organisation (AZAPO), designed to defy state repression and carry on the work of the BPC. While AZAPO sought to address various aspects of the black experience, it soon adhered to a more socialist interpretation and approach, even emphasizing workers’ concerns. Black Consciousness leadership in Ginsberg had previously highlighted the importance of changing unequal economic structures that disadvantaged the black majority and activists had begun exploring the idea of “black communalism,” but AZAPO now adopted a more explicit class analysis, which it called “scientific socialism.” Activists in AZAPO saw Black Consciousness’s focus on black self-reliance as making it a distinctively different organization, in opposition to other socialist-leaning organizations like the ANC and its supporters. This resulted at times in physically violent clashes. (The PAC and AZAPO have also clashed at times. 15 ) Activists in exile formed the Black Consciousness Movement of Azania (BCMA) as a sort of wing to AZAPO that operated in the 1980s.

Other activists took their conscientized outlook with them as they joined various existing organizations such as the ANC and the PAC. For them, Black Consciousness was an “attitude of mind” and “way of life” that black people needed to adopt, no matter what political organization they belonged to. Some activists in exile, for instance, who had been part of the BCMA eventually decided an additional organization was unnecessary and joined other organizations.

Different interpretations of Black Consciousness and various activists have persisted as people ask what it means to be free in a post-apartheid South Africa. AZAPO is still a political party, although a minor one (and it too has had breakaway factions). Others have written in the same style as Frank Talk. Some have interpreted Black Consciousness simply as promoting black economic and political ascendency or a celebration of black culture (which has translated into clothing lines, for instance). Others look to Black Consciousness for answers about how to uproot residual colonialism. In the early 2000s, younger generations of South Africans, transcending political party boundaries, looked to Black Consciousness as a radical challenge to prevailing racial structures. For example, university student movements in 2015 and 2016 evoked Black Consciousness when critiquing university curriculum and claiming a voice as youth. Some of these students saw a lack of black pride and economic inequality in South Africa as evidence of continued black oppression. Thus, black South Africans continue to evoke Black Consciousness.

Discussion of the Literature

Many scholars and writers have been inspired by Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness movement. This has resulted in a relatively large body of scholarship with authors primarily from South Africa and the United States taking perspectives ranging from the biographical and commemorative, political science, philosophy, history, and literary and visual arts. The amount of scholarship along with various news articles, commentaries, and short-run periodicals demonstrates the power of Biko as an icon and shows that people find relevancy in the movement’s ideas and history. Yet, many works reiterate common themes with an emphasis on Biko’s intellectual and political work.

The first authors who wrote about the Black Consciousness movement in the 1970s and 1980s included sympathetic political scientists and those seeking to commemorate Biko. A collection of Biko’s own writings was published along with a memoir by Biko’s friend, Father Aelred Stubbs, in 1978 , soon after Biko’s death. Various editions of this collection, entitled I Write What I Like , have appeared many times since. Three other books published at the same time similarly sought to publicize Biko’s ideas and expose the brutality of the apartheid regime, including Donald Woods’s Biko . 16 In a more scholarly vein, political scientists Gail Gerhart, Robert Fatton Jr., and CRD Halisi situated Black Consciousness in relation to other black political ideologies to discuss its ideas on race and citizenship. 17

The 1990s saw further commemoration of Biko, but a greater analysis of the Black Consciousness movement. Bounds of Possibility , a volume edited by Biko’s former colleagues and activists, included a brief biography of Biko and commemorative essays as well as various examinations of different aspects of the movement. Even though it perpetuated the focus on Biko, it broadened the analysis of the movement to touch on theology, cultural production, community engagement, and gender. Saleem Badat and Thomas Karis and Gerhart’s work in the late 1990s presaged greater historical analysis and summary of the movement found in subsequent works. 18 For example, in 2006 , Mbulelo Mzamane, Bavusile Maaba, and Nkosinathi Biko’s chapter in The Road to Democracy in South Africa , vol. 2, gave the most comprehensive summary of the movement to that date, and Bhekizizwe Peterson’s chapter in the same volume focused on Black Consciousness literary and other cultural work. 19 Former activists, friends, and politicians continued to add their personal reflections in monographs and edited collections, particularly at anniversaries of Biko’s death. 20 Biographies and edited collections in the early 2000s dealt with Black Consciousness’s philosophical, intellectual, and cultural production. This came as people questioned what it meant to be black and liberated in a post-apartheid, globalized world. For example, Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander, and Nigel Gibson’s Biko Lives! began with a substantial section entitled “Philosophical Dialogues,” and Nigel Gibson and Lewis R Gordon have focused on Black Consciousness’s relation to Fanon and existential thought, respectively. 21

More historical analyses were published as the 1970s became more distant. These works explored the origins, contexts, and impact of the 1970s movement. Daniel R. Magaziner published the first historical monograph of Black Consciousness. His The Law and the Prophets examined the movement’s intellectual history in the context of its time. Leslie Anne Hadfield provided an in-depth analysis of the movement’s extensive community development work in Liberation and Development . 22 Other scholars have emphasized Biko’s longer intellectual heritage, manifested in the museum exhibit at the Steve Biko Centre in Ginsberg, and in Xolela Mangcu’s biography of Biko. 23 These, along with other works published at the same time, notably dealt with questions about the place of women and youth in the movement. 24

Scholars of other disciplines such as art history and theology have continued to explore various parts of the movement and Biko’s impact in depth. 25 Updated collections of Biko’s writings continue to be published. Repeated references to Black Consciousness in South African politics and the growth in scholarly work about the movement indicates that new questions will draw out different aspects of the history of Black Consciousness and Biko in the future. 26 However, many works continue to commemorate Biko and the intellectual aspects of the movement at the expense of greater coverage, complexity, and historical sensitivity. This also has the effect of confining analyses to the Black Consciousness movement of the 1970s, with Biko’s death in 1977 seen as the close of that era. More work on the various actors and broader reach of the movement, including a focus on different regional experiences and contemporary adaptations of Black Consciousness, could prove to be enlightening and productive avenues for further research.

Primary Sources

In relation to the beginnings of Black Consciousness with SASO, there is a relative abundance of published primary sources and sources accessible online. These include Biko’s writings, literary and organizational publications, memoirs and interviews published in edited volumes. On the other hand, many written records from the time when state repression and police harassment increased have been lost or destroyed. Furthermore, after 1977 , the movement was more diffused, resulting in a less cohesive archive for this time period. The written record thus poses challenges for reconstructing the history of the Black Consciousness movement and Biko. Historians have turned to various different sources to create a fuller picture of the movement. Most notably, they have conducted numerous oral histories to fill in the gaps of the written record.

Public Archives

In addition to published primary sources, there are two main archival repositories in South Africa that hold substantial collections on Biko and the Black Consciousness movement, both written and oral sources. The Steve Biko Foundation has created an archive, now housed at the Steve Biko Centre in Ginsberg. This collection brings together sources from major public and personal archives concerning Biko, Black Consciousness, Black community programs of the 1970s, and many of Biko’s contemporaries. It includes copies of the South African Department of Justice files related to Steve Biko and Black Consciousness activists, copies from papers at the University of the Witwatersrand, the Bruce Haigh Special Collection, documents pertaining to the TRC Amnesty Application by the killers of Steve Biko, cuttings from the Daily Dispatch 1972 to 2003 , master’s and doctoral theses, and the collections of scholars such as Magaziner and Hadfield (including the transcripts of the oral histories they conducted).

The Historical Papers division of the William Cullen Library at the University of Witwatersrand has an extensive collection of material related to human and civil rights in South Africa. It has accessions with materials on: Steve Biko; SASO; AZAPO and the Azanian Student’s Organization; the Black People’s Convention; the SASO-BPC trial; and the research materials of Thomas Karis and Gail M. Gerhart used to write From Protest to Challenge (also available on microfilm at the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago). It also holds several valuable accessions on related organizations, such as the papers of the Christian Institute and the South African Council of Churches and their joint program, Spro-cas, the parent organization of the BCP and the papers of the University Christian Movement, and NUSAS. Some of these materials have been digitized and can be accessed online through the archive’s website.

Two other archives hold important materials. The Unisa Documentation Centre for African Studies at the University of South Africa main library in Pretoria has organizational brochures and documents related to the BCP, BPC, and SASO that are not found elsewhere, along with other miscellaneous Black Consciousness papers. For research on AZAPO and the BCMA, the National Heritage and Cultural Studies Centre (NAHECS) at the University of Fort Hare has the most extensive collection in their accession on the Azanian People’s Organization/Black Consciousness Movement (AZAPO/BCM).

Digital and Filmed Collections

Primary sources may also be found in online collections: Digital Innovation South Africa (DISA) digital library has copies of Black Consciousness publications such as the SASO Newsletter and Black Review ; the Aluka digital library’s Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa Collection includes a sampling of interviews and documents from Gerhart Interviews, Karis-Gerhart Collection, Magaziner Interviews, and NUSAS (but Aluka requires a subscription to access those materials); the Google Arts and Culture online exhibits includes a series on Biko with photographs and some documents. The South African History Online website includes a number of pages on Steve Biko, the Black Consciousness Movement, SASO, the BPC and SASO trial, and various activists with a sampling of primary documents linked to some of the pages. The Overcoming Apartheid website includes a multimedia resource page on the Black Consciousness movement with interviews from various activists. And finally, “The Black Consciousness Movement of South Africa—Material from the collection of Gail Gerhart,” filmed for the Cooperative Africana Microform Project (CAMP) is available on microfilm at the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago, Illinois.

Links to Digital Materials

Digital Innovation South Africa (DISA) .

Google Arts and Culture Institute: Steve Biko .

Overcoming Apartheid .

South African History Online .

Mubarak Aliyu

August 19th, 2021, steve biko and the philosophy of black consciousness.

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The Black Consciousness Movement pioneered by Steve Biko played a crucial role in the resistance to Apartheid in South Africa. Pursuing broad coalitions alongside ideas of Black theology and indigenous values, Biko’s role in the anti-Apartheid struggle can be read as one of philosopher as much as activist.

This post is a winning entry in the lse student writing competition black forgotten heroes , launched by the firoz lalji institute for africa ..

Born 18 December 1946, Steve Biko was a South African activist who pioneered the philosophy of Black Consciousness in the late 1960s. He later founded the South African Students Organisation (SASO) in 1968, in an effort to represent the interests of Black students in the then University of Natal (later KwaZulu-Natal). SASO was a direct response to what Biko saw as the inaction of the National Union of South African Students in representing the needs of Black students.

Biko’s experiences under Apartheid drove his philosophy and political activism. He had witnessed police raids during his childhood and lived through the brutality and intimidation the Apartheid government was known for. Biko’s philosophy focused primarily on liberating the minds of Black people who had been relegated to an inferior status by white power structures, seeing the power struggle in South Africa as ‘a microcosm of the confrontation between the third world and the first world’.

The philosophy of Black consciousness

The Black Consciousness Movement centred on race as a determining factor in the oppression of Black people in South Africa, in response to racial oppression and the dehumanisation of Black people under Apartheid. ‘Black’ as defined by Biko was not limited to Africans, but also included Asians and ‘coloureds’ (South Africans of mixed race including African, European and/or Asian origin), incorporating Black Theology, indigenous values and political organisation against the ruling system.

The movement viewed the liberation of the mind as the primary weapon in the fight for freedom in South Africa, defining Black consciousness as, first, an inward-looking process, where Black people regain the pride stripped away from them by the Apartheid system. His philosophy casts a positive retelling of African history, which has been heavily distorted and vilified by European imperialists in an attempt to construct their colonies. In his writings, he notes that ‘[a] people without a positive history is like a vehicle without an engine’.

At the heart of this thinking is the realisation by blacks that the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed

A necessary step towards restoring dignity to Black people, according to Biko, involves elevating the heroes of African history and promoting African heritage to deconstruct the idea of Africa as the dark continent. Black consciousness seeks to extract the positive values within indigenous African cultures and to make it a standard with which Black people judge themselves – the first form of resistance towards imperialism and Apartheid. According to Biko, ‘what black consciousness seeks to do is to produce at the output end of the process, real black people who do not consider themselves as appendages to white society’.

In Apartheid South Africa, Black consciousness aimed to unite citizens under the main cause of their oppression. Biko’s philosophy goes further to introduce the concept of Black theology, arguing the message in Christianity needs to be taught from the perspective of the oppressed to fit the journey of Black people’s self-realisation. According to Biko, Black theology must preach that it is a sin to allow oneself to be oppressed. Adapting Christianity to African values and belief systems is at the core of doing away with ‘spiritual poverty’.

In 1972, Biko founded the Black People’s Convention as an umbrella organisation for the Black Consciousness Movement, which had begun sweeping through universities across the nation. One year later, he and eight other leaders of the movement were banned by the South African government, which limited Biko to his home of King William’s Town. He continued to defy the banning order, however, by supporting the Convention, leading to several arrests in the following years.

On 21 August 1977, Biko was detained by the police and held at the eastern city of Port Elizabeth, where he was violently tortured and interrogated. By 11 September, he was found naked and chained to a prison cell door. He died in a hospital cell the following day as a result of brain injuries sustained at the hands of the police. Although the details of his torture remain unknown, Biko’s death has been understood by many South Africans as an assassination.

Black consciousness was beyond a movement; it was a philosophy deeply grounded in African Humanism, for which Biko should be considered not only an activist but a philosopher in his own right. His legacy remains one deeply relevant today – of resistance and self-determination in the face of widespread oppression.

All quotes are taken from Steve Biko’s selected writings in his book ‘I write what I like’ .

Photo : Steve Biko . Stained glass window by Daan Wildschut in the Saint Anna Church, Heerlen (the Netherlands), ca. 1976. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

About the author

Mubarak Aliyu is an MSc Development Studies candidate at LSE, with a specialism in African Development. His research interests include education reform, indigenous knowledge systems and grassroots political organisation.

Black history should be spread to empire the youth of Africans and erase the mind motive of slavery

The Born Frees ( Everyone Who Is Born During The State Of Independence Of South Africa ) Of South Africa Should Acknowledge Historical Legitimate Activists As Honoured Egalitarians And Patriots Who Fought For Freedom, Liberty & The Downfall Of Apartheid Regime. Those Legends Fought For Our Rights And Privileges We Are Currently Enjoying.

I’m The Top Learner (Historian) Of Mavalani High School Which Is Located South Africa In Limpopo.

This really helped me in my biography project and i got 85%

Thank you so much for the summary. I’m assisting a grade 5 learner with her school project

As a black South African woman in her 50s, I think it is every child’s right to know who they are. Black consciousness was and still is necessary. I’m saddened by what the apartheid regime did to us.

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What was the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa?

The Black Consciousness Movement was a resistance movement during the apartheid era that restored the dignity of black South Africans.

black consciousness movement biko solidarity

As colonialism in South Africa transformed into the brutality of apartheid , the role of black people in South African society was pushed to a position of absolute contempt. Black people worked the most menial jobs. They worked in the mines and on the farms. Many cleaned the houses of white people and worked in their gardens. Others were infantilized to the point where white people referred to black adults as “boy” or “girl.” Not only was their dignity stripped by the society in which they lived, but in their own minds, they were instilled with a sense of no self-worth. Anger at their predicament often turned to self-pity as they grew tired of fighting against such a powerful adversary.

In the 1960s, after the jailing of many African National Congress and Pan-Africanist Congress members, as well as the banning of these two organizations themselves, resistance took a new route. The Black Consciousness Movement sprung up and moved to instill in non-white people a sense of political consciousness and a restoration of their human dignity.

Ideology of the Black Consciousness Movement

black consciousness movement umkhonto wesizwe

For many black people, the early apartheid years were a time of frustration regarding feeling represented on any meaningful level. The African National Congress and Pan-Africanist Congress, movements that represented the hopes of black people, were banned and had difficulty making themselves present in South African society. Although the armed wing of the ANC, uMkhonto we Sizwe (founded by Nelson Mandela ), was active, it was a small guerilla army that couldn’t occupy South African land and did not have diplomatic power to win concessions from the apartheid government. In the perceived vacuum of black leadership, various organizations sprang up to address various issues relevant to the struggle for liberation and human rights for black South Africans.

The theoretical underpinning of the Black Consciousness Movement was one of re-shaping the dignity of black people by focusing on the fact that they were black. In this context, the term “black” was used to describe all non-white people. The existence of black culture and history were championed as sources of pride that formed a foundation for black people not feeling as if they had to be judged by white norms and standards. Through these circumstances, black people were offered the chance to be psychologically liberated, even under conditions where this freedom was suppressed.

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Many of these ideas were spread via the words of activist Stephen Biko . He became a symbol of the struggle for liberation, especially after his death at the hands of apartheid police in 1977. His ideas were influenced from many sources, such as WEB Du Bois , Marcus Garvey, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Léopold Senghor. The Black Consciousness Movement also drew much influence from political ideologies such as Marxism, Leninism, Pan-Africanism, African Socialism, and even included black theology, which became integral as it provided an alternative for spiritual expression.

The Early Years of the Black Consciousness Movement

The BCM was kickstarted by black students who wanted distinct black power separate from the supposedly “non-racial” student groups in which white students were the majority. They fought for an identity that unified all oppressed people in South Africa. The movement spread rapidly as black people found a new sense of pride. Many took part in leadership seminars, and Black Community Programs were established and served as avenues for self-sufficiency in black communities. Through the BCP, buildings were constructed all over the country to serve the needs of black people and the BCM. Many journals were also published and disseminated within black communities, including Black Voice, Black Review , Black Perspective , and Creativity in Development .

black consciousness movement frelimo rally

The BCP also organized mass protests and strikes, severely impacting the country in the early 1970s. In 1973, the government began to respond forcefully to these movements and banned them under the pretext that these movements were treasonous to black development. Widespread arrests were made, including the leadership of the BCP and the South African Students Organization (SASO). The following year, many top members of the BCM were arrested after holding a protest in support of the socialist FRELIMO government in neighboring Mozambique (there was a civil war between FRELIMO and the capitalist RENAMO. The apartheid government supported the latter). These leaders used the arrests as an opportunity to explain their ideology. Instead of the movement being crushed, it grew even further in popularity.

From 1976 Onwards

The BCM was deeply involved in the protests which shook the country in 1976. Thousands of students took to the streets to protest the new laws, which demanded that black people be taught in Afrikaans. These protests led to a riot on June 16, where South African police opened fire with live ammunition, leading to the deaths of 176 people (some estimates put the toll at over 700).

In the wake of the protests, the government tried to quell the growing unrest. This led to the arrest of Steve Biko. On September 12, 1977, Biko was beaten to death while in custody. A month after his death, the government declared 19 organizations linked to the BCM to be illegal. This further motivated black people to resist, and a new generation of activists swelled the ranks of the ANC and joined more established organizations such as the ANC, even though they were banned. Meetings were held to discuss new ways to resist, and out of these meetings, the Azanian People’s Organization was created: a political party that, along with the ANC and the PAC, still exists in South Africa’s political sphere. The movement also was helped in the form of one of South Africa’s most prominent voices, that of Nobel Peace Prize recipient Archbishop Desmond Tutu , who garnered support from all over the world.

The success of the BCM was also the reason for its decline. It instilled in many a sense of resistance and encouraged the growth of resistance nationwide. Many BCM members formed their own organizations, which evolved away from the tenets of the BCM movement. Nevertheless, the BCM had clearly been a success, as the black population had found a renewed sense of self-worth and the will to resist the injustices pressed upon them.

Meanwhile, the ANC came back to prominence as its plight was recognized internationally, and its support allowed it to be a presence within the lives of black South Africans who swelled its ranks.

The Legacy of the Black Consciousness Movement

While the heyday of the BCM is certainly over, it is because it is no longer needed on such a large scale. In that, it is clear that the BCM accomplished what it set out to do. The Black Consciousness Movement exists as an ideology and a theoretical viewpoint from which to conduct other activities. After the fall of apartheid, it was no longer necessary to conduct resistance movements, but nevertheless, the tenets of black consciousness are prominent in South African politics today. Chief among them is the restoration and preservation of dignity. Although technically aimed across the racial divide, it is clear that the theory is enacted where it is most needed.

Despite its success, however, the BCM was not without criticism. Donald Woods, a white liberal and close friend of Steve Biko, remarked on “the unavoidably racist aspects of Black Consciousness.” Its focus on “blackness” did not attract widespread appeal from other non-white groups. While it received much support from many who came to power after the fall of apartheid (and many who subsequently reside in government today), the emphasis of a movement solely for non-white people is very much downplayed by many South African politicians including Nelson Mandela . This attitude shows that the focus on “blackness” is at odds with the ANC government’s ideal of multi-racialism. In this, critics argue that the BCM’s ideas are obsolete and act as a hindrance to the ideals of New South Africa.

Other critics argue that the movement was ineffective in roles other than providing a theoretical framework for other organizations. They also argue that the community programs enacted by the BCM were too small to make significant differences. In addition, it has been pointed out that the BCM failed to bridge tribal divides among black South Africans–divides that still exist today.

Nevertheless, the BCM is still celebrated today as a significant part of the struggle for freedom. For many black people, the theories are just as important today as they were when they were founded.

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By Greg Beyer BA History & Linguistics, Journalism Diploma Greg specializes in African History. He holds a BA in History & Linguistics and a Journalism Diploma from the University of Cape Town. A former English teacher, he now excels in academic writing and pursues his passion for art through drawing and painting in his free time.

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The Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) was an influential student movement in the 1970s in Apartheid South Africa. The Black Consciousness Movement promoted a new identity and politics of racial solidarity and became the voice and spirit of the anti-apartheid movement at a time when both the African National Congress and the Pan-Africanist Congress had been banned in the wake of the Sharpeville Massacre . The BCM reached its zenith in the Soweto Student Uprising of 1976 but declined quickly afterward.

Rise of the Black Consciousness Movement

The Black Consciousness Movement began in 1969 when African students walked out of the National Union of South African Students, which was multiracial but white-dominated, and founded the South African Students Organization (SASO). The SASO was an explicitly non-white organization open to students classified as African, Indian, or Coloured under Apartheid Law.

It was to unify non-white students and provide a voice for their grievances, but the SASO spearheaded a movement that reached far beyond students. Three years later, in 1972, the leaders of this Black Consciousness Movement formed the Black People’s Convention (BPC) to reach out to and galvanize adults and non-students.

Aims and Forerunners of the BCM

Loosely speaking, the BCM aimed to unify and uplift non-white populations, but this meant excluding a previous ally, liberal anti-apartheid whites. As Steve Biko , the most prominent Black Consciousness leader, explained, when militant nationalists said that white people did not belong in South Africa, they meant that “we wanted to remove [the white man] from our table, strip the table of all trappings put on it by him, decorate it in true African style, settle down and then ask him to join us on our own terms if he liked.”

The elements of Black pride and celebration of Black culture linked the Black Consciousness Movement back to the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as the ideas of pan-Africanism and La Negritude movement. It also arose at the same time as the Black Power movement in the United States, and these movements inspired each other; Black Consciousness was both militant and avowedly non-violent. The Black Consciousness movement was also inspired by the success of the FRELIMO in Mozambique.

Soweto and the Afterlives of the BCM

The exact connections between the Black Consciousness Movement and the Soweto Student Uprising are debated, but for the Apartheid government, the connections were clear enough. In the aftermath of Soweto, the Black People’s Convention and several other Black Consciousness movements were banned and their leadership arrested, many after being beaten and tortured, including Steve Biko who died in police custody.

The BPC was partially resurrected in the Azania People’s Organization, which is still active in South African politics.

Steve, Biko, I Write What I like: Steve Biko. A Selection of his Writings, ed. by Aelred Stubbs, African Writers Series . (Cambridge: Proquest, 2005), 69.
Desai, Ashwin, “Indian South Africans and the Black Consciousness Movement under Apartheid.” Diaspora Studies 8.1 (2015): 37-50.
Hirschmann, David. “The Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa.” The Journal of Modern African Studies . 28.1 (Mar., 1990): 1-22.
Biography of Stephen Bantu (Steve) Biko, Anti-Apartheid Activist
Biography of Nontsikelelo Albertina Sisulu, South African Activist
What Was Apartheid in South Africa?
16 June 1976 Student Uprising in Soweto
The End of South African Apartheid
Understanding South Africa's Apartheid Era
Biography of Donald Woods, South African Journalist
A Brief History of South African Apartheid
Apartheid 101
Grand Apartheid in South Africa
Pass Laws During Apartheid
Memorable Quotes by Steve Biko
The Origins of Apartheid in South Africa
South Africa's Extension of University Education Act of 1959
The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act
Apartheid Quotes About Bantu Education

Steve Biko: The Black Consciousness Movement

The saso, bcp & bpc years.

By Steve Biko Foundation

Stephen Bantu Biko was an anti-apartheid activist in South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. A student leader, he later founded the Black Consciousness Movement which would empower and mobilize much of the urban black population. Since his death in police custody, he has been called a martyr of the anti-apartheid movement. While living, his writings and activism attempted to empower black people, and he was famous for his slogan “black is beautiful”, which he described as meaning: “man, you are okay as you are, begin to look upon yourself as a human being”. Scroll on to learn more about this iconic figure and his pivotal role in the Black Consciousness Movement...

“Black Consciousness is an attitude of mind and a way of life, the most positive call to emanate from the black world for a long time” - Biko

1666/67 University of Natal SRC

On completion of his matric at St Francis College, Biko registered for a medical degree at the University of Natal’s Black Section. The University of Natal professed liberalism and was home to some of the leading intellectuals of that tradition. The University of Natal had also become a magnet attracting a number of former black educators, some of the most academically capable members of black society, who had been removed from black colleges by the University Act of 1959. The University of Natal also attracted as law and medical students some of the brightest men and women from various parts of the country and from various political traditions. Their convergence at the University of Natal in the 1960s turned the University into a veritable intellectual hub, characterised by a diverse culture of vibrant political discourse. The University thus became the mainstay of what came to be known as the Durban Moment.

At Natal Biko hit the ground running. He was immediately influenced by, and in turn, influenced this dynamic environment. He was elected to serve on the Student's Representative Council (SRC) of 1966/67, in the year of his admission. Although he initially supported multiracial student groupings, principally the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), a number of voices on campus were radically opposed to NUSAS, through which black students had tried for years to have their voices heard but to no avail. This kind of frustration with white liberalism was not altogether unknown to Steve Biko, who had experienced similar disappointment at Lovedale.

Medical Students at the University of Natal (Left to Right: Brigette Savage, Rogers Ragavan, Ben Ngubane, Steve Biko)

Correspondence designating Biko as an SRC delegate at the annual NUSAS Conference

In 1967, Biko participated as an SRC delegate at the annual NUSAS conference held at Rhodes University. A dispute arose at the conference when the host institution prohibited racially mixed accommodation in obedience to the Group Areas Act, one of the laws under apartheid that NUSAS professed to abhor but would not oppose. Instead NUSAS opted to drive on both sides of the road: it condemned Rhodes University officials while cautioning black delegates to act within the limits of the law. For Biko this was another defining moment that struck a raw nerve in him.

Speech by Dr. Saleem Badat, author of Black Man You Are on Your Own, on SASO

Reacting angrily, Biko slated the artificial integration of student politics and rejected liberalism as empty echoes by people who were not committed to rattling the status quo but who skilfully extracted what best suited them “from the exclusive pool of white privileges”. This gave rise to what became known as the Best-able debate: Were white liberals the people best able to define the tempo and texture of black resistance? This debate had a double thrust. On the one hand, it was aimed at disabusing white society of its superiority complex and challenged the liberal establishment to rethink its presumed role as the mouthpiece of the oppressed. On the other, it was designed as an equally frank critique of black society, targeting its passivity that cast blacks in the role of “spectators” in the course of history. The 7th April 1960 saw the banning of the African National Congress and the Pan African Congress and the imprisonment of the leadership of the liberation movement had created a culture of apathy

Bantu Stephen Biko

“ We have set out on a quest for true humanity, and somewhere on the distant horizon we can see the glittering prize. Let us march forth with courage and determination, drawing strength from our common plight and our brotherhood. In time we shall be in a position to bestow upon South Africa the greatest gift possible - a more human face.”

Biko argued that true liberation was possible only when black people were, themselves, agents of change. In his view, this agency was a function of a new identity and consciousness, which was devoid of the inferiority complex that plagued black society. Only when white and black societies addressed issues of race openly would there be some hope for genuine integration and non-racialism.

Transcript of a 1972 Interview with Biko

At the University Christian Movement (UCM) meeting at Stutterheim in 1968, Biko made further inroads into black student politics by targeting key individuals and harnessing support for an exclusively black movement. In 1969, at the University of the North near Pietersburg, and with students of the University of Natal playing a leading role, African students launched a blacks-only student organisation, the South African Student Organisation (SASO). SASO committed itself to the philosophy of black consciousness. Biko was elected president.

Black Student Manifesto

The idea that blacks could define and organise themselves and determine their own destiny through a new political and cultural identity rooted in black consciousness swept through most black campuses, among those who had experienced the frustrations of years of deference to whites. In a short time, SASO became closely identified with 'Black Power' and African humanism and was reinforced by ideas emanating from Diasporan Africa. Successes elsewhere on the continent, which saw a number of countries, achieve independence from their colonial masters also fed into the language of black consciousness.

SASO's Definition of Black Consciousness

Cover of a 1971 SASO Newsletter

“ In 1968 we started forming what is now called SASO... which was firmly based on Black Consciousness, the essence of which was for the black man to elevate his own position by positively looking at those value systems that make him distinctively a man in society” - Biko

Cover of a 1971 SASO Newsletter

Cover of a 1972 SASO Newsletter

Cover of SASO newsletter, 1973

Cover of a 1975 SASO Newsletter

Steve Biko speaks on BCM

The Black People’s Convention By 1971, the influence of SASO had spread well beyond tertiary education campuses. A growing body of people who were part of SASO were also exiting the university system and needed a political home. SASO leaders moved for the establishment of a new wing of their organisation that would embrace broader civil society. The Black People’s Convention (BPC) with just such an aim was launched in 1972. The BPC immediately addressed the problems of black workers, whose unions were not yet recognised by the law. This invariably set the new organisation on a collision path with the security forces. By the end of the year, however, forty-one branches were said to exist. Black church leaders, artists, organised labour and others were becoming increasingly politicised and, despite the banning in 1973 of some of the leading figures in the movement, black consciousness exponents became most outspoken, courageous and provocative in their defiance of white supremacy.

BPC Membership Card

Minutes of the first meeting of the Black People's Convention

In 1974 nine leaders of SASO and BPC were charged with fomenting unrest. The accused used the seventeen-month trial as a platform to state the case of black consciousness in a trial that became known as the Trial of Ideas. They were found guilty and sentenced to various terms of imprisonment, although acquitted on the main charge of being party to a revolutionary conspiracy.

SASO/BPC Trial Coverage SASO/BPC Trial Coverage BPC Members

SASO/BPC Coverage

Poster from the 1974 Viva Frelimo Rally

Their conviction simply strengthened the black consciousness movement. Growing influence led to the formation of the South African Students Movement (SASM), which targeted and organised at high school level. SASM was to play a pivotal role in the student uprisings of 1976.

Barney Pityana, Founding SASO Member

In 1972, the year of the birth of the BPC, Biko was expelled from medical school. His political activities had taken a toll on his studies. More importantly, however, according to his friend and comrade Barney Pityana, “his own expansive search for knowledge had gone well beyond the field of medicine.” Biko would later go on to study law through the University of South Africa.

Steve Biko's Order Form for Law Textbooks

Upon leaving university, Biko joined the Durban offices of the Black Community Programmes (BCP), the developmental wing of the Black People Convention, as an employee reporting to Ben Khoapa. The Black Community Programmes engaged in a number of community-based projects and published a yearly called Black Review, which provided an analysis of political trends in the country.

Black Community Programmes Pamphlet

Overview of the BCP

BCP Head, Ben Khoapa

86 Beatrice Street, Former Headquarters of the BCP

"To understand me correctly you have to say that there were no fears expressed" - Biko

Ben Khoapa, Beatrice Street Circa 2007

Biko's Banning Order

When Biko was banned in March 1973, along with Khoapa, Pityana and others, he was deported from Durban to his home town, King William’s Town. Many of the other leaders of SASO, BPC, and BCP were relocated to disparate and isolated locations. Apart from assaulting the capacity of the organisations to function, the bannings were also intended to break the spirit of individual leaders, many of whom would be rendered inactive by the accompanying banning restrictions and thus waste away.

Following his banning, Biko targeted local organic intellectuals whom he engaged with as much vigour as he had engaged the more academic intellectuals at the University of Natal. Only this time, the focus was on giving depth to the practical dimension of BC ideas on development, which had been birthed within SASO and the BPC. He set up the King William’s Town office (No 15 Leopold Street) of the Black Community Programmes office where he stood as Branch Executive. The organisation focused on projects in Health, Education, Job Creation and other areas of community development.

No 15 Leopold Street , Former King William's Town Offices of the BCP

It was not long before his banning order was amended to restrict him from any meaningful association with the BCP. Biko could not meet with more that one person at a time. He could not leave the magisterial area of King William’s Town without permission from the police. He could not participate in public functions nor could he be published or quoted.

Zanempilo Clinic, a BPC Clinic

These restrictions on him and others in the BCM and their regular arrests, forced the development of a multiplicity of layers of leadership within the organisation in order to increase the buoyancy of the organisation. Notwithstanding the challenges, the local Black Community Programme office did well, managing among other achievements to build and operate Zanempilo Clinic, the most advanced community health centre of its time built without public funding. According to Dr. Ramphele, “it was a statement intended to demonstrate how little, with proper planning and organisation, it takes to deliver the most basic of services to our people.” Dr. Ramphele and Dr. Solombela served as resident doctors at Zanempilo Clinic.

Community Member from Njwaxa

Other projects under Biko’s office included Njwaxa Leatherworks Project, a community crèche and a number of other initiatives. Biko was also instrumental in founding in 1975 the Zimele Trust Fund set up to assist political prisoners and their families. Zimele Trust did not discriminate on the basis of party affiliation. In addition, Biko set up the Ginsberg Educational Trust to assist black students. This trust was also a plough-back to a community that had once assisted him with his own education.

Click on the Steve Biko Foundation logo to continue your journey into Biko's extraordinary life. Take a look at Steve Biko: The Black Consciousness Movement, Steve Biko: The Final Days, and Steve Biko: The Legacy.

—Steve Biko Foundation:

Steve Biko: The Inquest

Steve biko foundation, 11 february 1990: mandela's release from prison, africa media online, detention without trial in john vorster square, south african history archive (saha), what happened at the treason trial, steve biko: final days, 9 august 1956: the women's anti-pass march, steve biko: the early years, the signs that defined the apartheid, steve biko: legacy, leadership during the rise and fall of apartheid.

The History of Black Consciousness

First Online: 14 October 2017

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Beginning with its roots in Bantu Education, this chapter sketches the rise and fall of Black Consciousness. Penfold summarises the diverse and complex influences behind this struggle ideology that was led by Steve Biko. Importantly, Penfold suggests that Black Consciousness must be fundamentally understood as a cultural movement. He also questions the suitability of using simplified racial binaries when discussing Black Consciousness ideology. The chapter ends with a discussion of the 1976 Soweto Uprisings. It speculates as to the different ways Black Consciousness remained prominent in South Africa’s political and literary psyche after its official banning.

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Penfold, T. (2017). The History of Black Consciousness. In: Black Consciousness and South Africa’s National Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57940-5_2

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Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement Grade 12 Essay Guide (Question and Answers)

Black Consciousness Movement Grade 12 Essay Guide (Question and Answers) and Summary: The Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) was a grassroots anti-Apartheid activist movement that emerged in South Africa in the mid-1960s out of the political vacuum created by the jailing and banning of the African National Congress and Pan Africanist Congress leadership after the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960.

Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement Summary: A Legacy of Empowerment and Resistance

Stephen Bantu Biko , born in 1946 in South Africa, was a prominent anti-apartheid activist and leader of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) . The movement played a crucial role in the fight against apartheid by empowering black South Africans to embrace their identity, instilling pride and self-worth, and promoting resistance against the oppressive regime. This article will discuss Biko’s life, the origins and objectives of the Black Consciousness Movement, and the lasting impact of Biko’s ideas on South Africa and beyond.

Early Life and Influences

Steve Biko grew up in a society deeply divided along racial lines. From an early age, he was exposed to the harsh realities of apartheid, which inspired his lifelong commitment to fighting against racial oppression. As a student at Lovedale High School , Biko encountered the writings of Frantz Fanon , a psychiatrist and philosopher from Martinique who advocated for the liberation of colonized peoples through mental emancipation. Fanon’s ideas influenced Biko’s development of the Black Consciousness philosophy.

Formation of the Black Consciousness Movement

In 1968, Biko co-founded the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) with other like-minded black students. SASO aimed to provide a platform for black students to challenge apartheid and create a sense of unity among them. The organization became the backbone of the Black Consciousness Movement, which sought to empower black South Africans by encouraging them to embrace their identity and value their cultural heritage. By fostering a strong sense of self-worth, the BCM aimed to break down the psychological barriers imposed by apartheid.

Philosophy and Goals

Central to the Black Consciousness Movement was the idea that black South Africans needed to liberate themselves from the mental chains of apartheid. The movement emphasized the importance of self-reliance and self-determination, rejecting the notion that white people were necessary for the liberation of black South Africans. Instead, Biko and the BCM insisted that black people could achieve freedom by developing their own solutions to the problems caused by apartheid.

Biko often spoke about the need to redefine “blackness” as a positive identity, fostering pride and unity among black South Africans. He also believed that social, political, and economic empowerment were essential for the liberation of black people, and that these goals could be achieved through community-based projects and initiatives.

Arrest, Death, and Legacy

The South African government saw Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement as a significant threat to the apartheid regime. In 1973, Biko was banned from participating in political activities and confined to the Eastern Cape. Despite these restrictions, he continued to work clandestinely to advance the goals of the movement.

In August 1977, Biko was arrested, and on September 12, he died from a brain injury sustained while in police custody. His death sparked international outrage and galvanized the anti-apartheid movement, drawing global attention to the brutalities of the apartheid regime.

Today, Steve Biko is remembered as a martyr and a symbol of resistance against racial oppression. The Black Consciousness Movement played a crucial role in the fight against apartheid by empowering black South Africans to take control of their destiny. Biko’s ideas continue to inspire generations of activists worldwide, who strive for social justice and the eradication of racial inequality.

How Essays are Assessed in Grade 12

The essay will be assessed holistically (globally). This approach requires the teacher to score the overall product as a whole, without scoring the component parts separately. This approach encourages the learner to offer an individual opinion by using selected factual evidence to support an argument. The learner will not be required to simply regurgitate ‘facts’ in order to achieve a high mark. This approach discourages learners from preparing ‘model’ answers and reproducing them without taking into account the specific requirements of the question. Holistic marking of the essay credits learners’ opinions supported by evidence. Holistic assessment, unlike content-based marking, does not penalise language inadequacies as the emphasis is on the following:

The construction of an argument
The appropriate selection of factual evidence to support such an argument
The learner’s interpretation of the question.

Steve Biko: Black Consciousness Movement Grade 12 Essay s Topics

Topic: the challenge of black consciousness to the apartheid state.

Introduction

K ey Definitions

Civil protest : Opposition (usually against the current government’s policy) by ordinary citizens of a country
Uprising : Mass action against government policy
Bantu Homelands : Regions identified under the apartheid system as so-called homelands for different cultural and linguistic groups.
Prohibition : order by which something may not be done; prohibit; declared illegal
Resistance : When an individual or group of people work together against specific domination
Exile : When someone is banished from their country

(Background)

“South Africa as an apartheid state in 1970 to 1980
1978 PW Botha and launched his “Total Strategy”
There were limited powers granted to the Colored, Indians and black township councils to ensure economic and political white supremacy
Despite these reforms, Africans still did not gain any political rights outside their homelands
Government’s response to violence against government reform policies – the declaration of a state of emergency in 1985:
Banishment of the ANC and PAC to Sharpeville in 1960 – Underground Organizations
Leaders of the Liberation Movements were in prisons or in exile
New legislation – Terrorism Act – increases apartheid government’s power to suppress political opposition •Detention without trial – leads to the deaths of many activists
Torture of activists in custody
Increasing militarization within the country
Bantu education ensures a low-paid labour force •Apartheid regime had total control
In the late 1960s there was a new kind of resistance – The Black Consciousness Movement

( Nature and Objectives of Black Consciousness )

In the late 1970s, a new generation of black students began to organize resistance
Many were students at “forest college” established under the Bantu education system for black students such as the University of Zululand and the University of the North
They accepted the Black Consciousness philosophy
The term “black” was a direct dispute with the apartheid term “non-white”.
“Black people” were all who were oppressed by apartheid – including Indians and coloured people

Black Consciousness Movement Grade 12 Questions

Question 1: how did the ideas of the black consciousness movement challenge the apartheid regime in the 1970.

How to answer and get good marks?

Learners must use relevant evidence e.g. Uses relevant evidence that shows a thorough understanding of how the ideas of Black Consciousness challenged the apartheid regime in the 1970s .
Learners must also use evidence very effectively in an organised paragraph that shows an understanding of the topic

When you answer, you should not ignore the following key facts where applicable:

Black Consciousness wanted black South Africans to do things for themselves
Black Consciousness wanted black South Africans to act independently of other races x Self-reliance promoted self-pride among black South Africans

SASO references can also be applicable (if sources are presented)

SASO was formed to propagate the ideas of Black Consciousness
To safeguard and promote the interests of black South Africans students
SASO was based on the philosophy of Black Consciousness
SASO was associated with Steve Biko
SASO encouraged black South Africans students to be self-assertive

Question 2: How did the truth and reconciliation commision assist South Africa to come in terms with the past?

To ensure healing and reconciliation among victims and perpetrators of political violence through confession
The TRC encouraged the truth to be told
Hoped to bring about forgiveness through healing
To bring about ‘Reconciliation and National Unity’ among all South Africans
Any other relevant response.

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The Ideology of the Black Consciousness Movement

The emergence of the Black Consciousness movement that swept across the country in the 1970s can best be explained in the context of the events from 1960 onwards. After the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, the National Party (NP) government, which was formed in 1947, intensified its repression to curb widespread civil unrest. It did this by passing harsher laws, extending its use of torture, imprisonment and detentions without trial.

By the late 1960s, the government had jailed, banned or exiled the majority of the Liberation Movement’s leaders. In response to this, an intensified wave of tyranny, and a new set of organisations emerged. These organisations filled the vacuum created by the government’s suppression of the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960. United loosely around a set of ideas described as “Black Consciousness,” these organisations helped to educate and organise Black people, particularly the youth. In fact, the eruption of the Black Consciousness Movement signalled an end to the quiescence that followed the banning of the black political movements.

The BCM urged a defiant rejection of apartheid, especially among Black workers and the youth. The South African Students Organisation (SASO) - an arm of the movement - was founded by Black students who refused to join NUSAS , another student led organization. At the same time, Black workers began to organise trade unions in defiance of anti-strike laws. In 1973, there were strikes throughout the nation, in cities like Durban. The collapse of Portuguese colonialism and the victories of the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) in Mozambique, and the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in Angola, stimulated further activity against apartheid. This culminated in the Soweto Uprising of 1976.

In 1976, student protests against Bantu education in Soweto, the Johannesburg informal settlement reserved for Africans, led to a two-year uprising that spread to Black townships across the country. The protests encompassed all Black grievances against the apartheid system, and in that period police reportedly killed many protesters, including schoolchildren. Workers then mobilised to protest police killings of innocent demonstrators.

In the following year, boycotts and unrest among students and teachers grew after Steve Biko , a leader of SASO, died in a Pretoria detention cell. He had been detained by the police under the Terrorism Act, and after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in the 1990s, it was revealed that he was tortured and killed by police. Within a month of Biko’s death, the government had detained scores of people and banned 18 Black Consciousness organizations, as well as two newspapers with a wide Black readership.

The Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa is synonymous with its founder, Biko. From the beginning of Biko’s political life until his death, he remains one of the indisputable icons of the Black struggle against apartheid. As leader of the movement, he instilled courage among the masses to fight an unjust system under the banner of Black Consciousness. Defining Black Consciousness is no mean task. However, a broad understanding of the concept can be made from Biko’s speeches and writings, including those of his close friends and other writers.

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The Oxford Handbook of Global South Youth Studies

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16 From Black Consciousness to Consciousness of Blackness

Professor Xolela Mangcu was born and raised in Ginsberg Township in King William’s Town, South Africa, the home of the Black Consciousness leader, Steve Biko. In the 1980’s he served as chairman of the Black Consciousness Movement at Wits University in Johannesburg. After graduating with a BA and MSc degrees at Wits, Mangcu pursued graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cornell University, where he obtained his PhD in city and regional planning. Back in South Africa he was the founding Executive Director of the Steve Biko Foundation. He is the author of ten books, including the award-winning Biko: A Biography. His biography of Nelson Mandela will be soon be published by Yale University Press. Mangcu was Professor of Sociology at the University of Cape Town and is now Professor of Sociology and History and Director of Africana Studies at George Washington University in the United States. He is also Visiting Professor at Nelson Mandela University in South Africa.

Published: 10 February 2021
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This essay argues for a revision of Black Consciousness philosophy to make it more consistent with the requirements of South Africa’s constitutional democracy and relevant to the aspirations of young people in South Africa and the Global South. The philosophy was founded within an oppressive racist society, and while it defined blackness in terms of the legal oppression of Black people, those conditions no longer exist in South Africa. On the contrary, the South African constitution adopted both the inclusive view of Black people as Africans, Indians, and Coloureds, and expressly forbids racial or other forms of discrimination. The new political and constitutional setting thus demands a new articulation of blackness as a set of historical values that emanate from the experience of oppression. These values were expressed by Black intellectuals during self-reliant development and struggles against racism and can form the basis for reshaping racial identities in the Global South.

Introduction

Too often when politicians speak about youth policy they have in mind youth economic inequality. While important, this approach obscures an equally important part of young people’s lives—the sociohistorical meaning of racial identity. In fact, the inequalities are often sustained by the perceptions of racial identities. And yet young people often lack the political and intellectual frameworks that once informed liberation movements such as the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa. In part this contributed to the demobilization of civil society that followed the democratization of South African society. Racial identity was dismissed as something of the past, as if Black people had no identities beyond their economic needs. Racial denial was taking place despite the all-too-evident racial disparities in the country. The rise of student movements such as #RhodesMustFall, calling for the decolonization of South African universities, promised to contest and reverse this racial denial. In their conduct, however, these movements missed an opportunity to initiate what Howard Winant ( 1988 , p. 173) describes as “a racial project for new times.” In their influential book, Racial formation in the United States , Michael Omi and Howard Winant ( 2015 , p. 125) define a racial project as “an attempt at racial signification and identity formation on the one hand; and a political initiative, an attempt at organization and redistribution.” The definition attempts to cover both the discursive and cultural bases on the one hand (race as a source of meaning) and the structural and economic dimensions (race as material existence).

The first part of this article presents consciousness of Blackness as the basis for exactly such a racial project. Consciousness of Blackness is likely to speak more directly to the needs and aspirations of young people than the more universal and abstract concept of decolonization. Because of the absence of a racial project youth activists have taken the wrong lessons from both decolonization and Black Consciousness. What is common, however, is the tendency to interpret these philosophies as anti-White—yet, when confronted with the truth of both Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko’s writings, many radicals have been surprised no end. Both men were particularly against racial reason that predominates among many contemporary radicals. Fanon was particularly critical of Senegal’s Léopold Senghor and Martinque’s Aime Cesaire’s obsession with race. As he put it, “this historical obligation in which men of African culture racialize their claims and speak more of African culture than of national culture leads these men down a cul de sac” (Fanon, 1961 , p. 152). He was just as scathing of Negritude’s appeal to an ancient civilization as the basis of Black identity: “In no way should I dedicate myself to the revival of an unjustly unrecognized Negro civilization. I will not make myself of any past. I do not want to sing the past at the expense of my present and my future” (Fanon, 1952/2008 , p. 176 In The Lived Experience of the Black (Fanon, 1951 / 2001 ), he rejected the notion of a unified, essential Black identity, as if there were no differences among African experiences.

Blackness as a Historical Identity

Just as Fanon had warned against the racialization of culture, Biko advocated what could be termed a ‘joint culture.’ In an interview with a European journalist, Biko lamented that South Africa existed as a “province of Europe” (Biko 1978 / 1987 , p. 131). He proposed the idea of the joint culture as the basis of a new South African national identity:

We have whites here who are descended from Europe. We don’t dispute that but for God’s sake it must have African experience as well…the culture shared by the majority group in any given society must ultimately determine the broad direction taken by the joint culture of that society. This need not cramp the style of those who feel differently but on the whole, a country in Africa, in which the majority of people are African must inevitably exhibit African values and be truly African in style. (Biko 1978 / 1987 , p. 24)

He warned against those who would present Black Consciousness as anti-White. This did not mean, however, that South Africa should not grapple with racism. Quite the contrary, he proposed a more substantive critique of White racism as something more than just skin color. Race was not a matter of skin pigmentations, but an attitude of mind—an attitude of superiority among Whites and inferiority among Blacks. A mere focus on skin color was thus shallow and incapable of generating the kind of critical -consciousness required for a truly anti-racist society.

Biko did not go into detail about what such a ‘joint culture’ might entail—certainly not to the extent that he had done with the central elements of the philosophy—a critique of White racism and promotion of Black solidarity. This article suggests that the joint culture must be predicated on a critical consciousness of the substantive meaning of Blackness, what I call the ‘Consciousness of Blackness.’ As an ideal for a constitutional democracy Consciousness of Blackness retains some of the key concepts of Black Consciousness while jettisoning the exclusivist foundations of the original philosophy. While the movement’s central strategic thrust was the exclusion of Whites from its membership and the creation of a strong Black solidarity, this exclusivist approach is no longer consistent with the letter or spirit of a constitutional democracy.

It hardly needs pointing out that Biko’s definition of Blackness no longer applies in a constitutional democracy. He wrote that “Blacks as those who are by law or tradition, politically, economically and socially discriminated against as a group in the South African society and identifying themselves as a unit in the struggle toward the realization of their aspirations” (Biko, 1978 / 1987 , p. 48). Even though Black people are still victims of racism, are largely excluded from the mainstream economy, and have the worst educational and social outcomes, they are no longer oppressed by law or tradition. Far from any legal oppression, the South African constitution bars any form of racial discrimination. The persistence of these inequalities cannot be the basis of a collective racial identity, unless one treats race as an epiphenomenon of such inequalities. It’s also necessary to go beyond revising the experiential foundations of the definitions to also change the prescription of Black political solidarity. In a democratic society, Black people are likely to have various political views, just like any other group of people.

Nonetheless the positive elements of Blackness should still be retained, such as Biko’s broadened political definition that extended Blackness beyond just Africans to include Coloureds and Indians. It is indeed a tribute to the movement’s effectiveness that this broad definition became the basis of the constitution’s definition of Blackness. According to Biko’s close friend and spiritual mentor, Aelred Stubbs, the Black Consciousness definition of Blackness was a singular contribution of the movement:

I am not sure that the importance of this achievement, in the given social structures of South Africa, has been emphasized…but the way in which [the South African Students’ Organization] SASO managed to overcome traditional barriers between Coloureds and Africans…was not only indicative of a new mood in the young Coloured community, but a significant achievement of non-ethnic black solidarity. (Stubbs, 2002 , p. 195)

Instead of placing the premium on a political definition developed under conditions of struggle, one should substitute a historical definition. Thus we might say that Black people are those who were the historical victims of colonial and apartheid domination, but whose struggles against such domination created new conceptions of democracy and identity in South Africa. Consciousness of those struggles would constitute the basis for a new conception of Blackness as a historical legacy.

To paraphrase Cornel West ( 1993 ), this definition recognizes the victimization of Black people without basing their self-understanding on victimhood but on their agency. It also allows for the multiplicity of the traditions of struggle. The question this may raise is whether those who were excluded from Blackness in the past would be included in the proposed revision. The answer is an unequivocal yes. Group identities are fashioned on the basis of selective forgetting and remembering, highlighting that which emphasized the goodness of the group. No group advertises itself as founded on traditions of plunder and thievery, for example.

It may seem odd to some to argue for a retention of Black Consciousness in a non-racial society. Surely, the reasonable thing to do would be to do away with race-based identity altogether. Such a reaction assumes that the only way to think about race is that fashioned by the founders of racial science in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe and America. As Gary Peller argues, the dismissal of racial identity is due to a long-standing Enlightenment conception of progress, one in which “the transition from segregation to integration and from race consciousness to race neutrality mirrors movements from myth to enlightenment, from ignorance to knowledge, from superstition to reason, from the primitive to the civilized, from religion to secularism”, and that’s the definition of progress. (Peller 1990 , p. 774). But as Jeremy Tanner argues, “the conventional use of Euro-American racism as the implicit comparative norm may desensitize us to the…more subtle characteristics of racialized representation in other traditions, even to the extent of blinding us to their existence” (Tanner 2010 , pp. 15–16).

These varying traditions have been both pernicious and affirming to the oppressed. During the Inquisition in the late fifteenth century, Spaniards used the term razza [race] to persecute Jews and Moors. As Denise Kimber Buell notes, “we are used to thinking of science, especially the biological sciences, as the site for authoritative knowledge about race. But we have already seen that race had already been the domain for the production of ideas about racial difference” (Buell 2005 , p. 21).

These ethno-religious beginnings of modern racism were later replaced by the scientific racism that came with the rise of natural philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But as the German philosopher Alexander Humboldt noted, these systems of racism assumed a similar logic:

In Spain, it is a kind of title of nobility not to descend from Jews or Moors. In America, the skin, more or less white, is what dictates the class an individual occupies in society. A white, even if he rides barefoot on horseback, considers himself to be a member of the nobility of the country. (Humboldt, as cited in Fredrickson, 2002 , p. 42)

However, not all European philosophers rejected the retrograde scientific notions of race among their peers, particularly the theory of polygenesis that dominated some of their thinking:

[Y]ou human…should honor yourself. Neither the pongo nor the gibbon is your brother, whereas the African and the Negro certainly are. You should not oppress him, nor murder him, nor steal from him: for he is a human being just as you are. (von Herder, as cited in Bernasconi, 2000 , p. 26)

He offered a nationalistic definition of race that would have a great impact on the theories of race that emerged among Black intellectuals. Omi and Winant ( 2015 ) described the contributions of these intellectuals to the concept of racial identity as follows:

Led by the protean intellectual and activist W.E.B. du Bois, such scholars as Alain Locke, Kelly Miller, William Monroe Trotter, Anna Julia Cooper, and others, created a social science of race and racism, refusing and refuting the biologistic racism of their white contemporaries. (p. 5)

Bernasconi notes that Du Bois “proposed a definition of race based on socio-historical criteria” (Bernasconi, 2000 , p. xiv). He defined race as “a vast family of human beings, generally of common blood and language, always of common histories, traditions, and impulses, who are both voluntarily and involuntarily striving together for the accomplishment of certain more or less vividly conceived ideals of life” (Bernasconi, 2000 , p. 110). Cornel West ( 1993 , p. 39) also provided a cultural definition of Blackness. He described Blackness as a cultural armor that “constituted ways of life and struggle that embodied values of service and sacrifice, love and care, discipline and excellence.”

An historical definition of Blackness would be even more specific by focusing on the values generated over time. The focus is on the three dimensions of Black life mentioned earlier: the intellectual, developmental, and anti-racist values created over centuries of struggle. This project goes beyond South Africa, for everywhere they have struggled against White domination, Black people have created new values that affirmed the humanity of every living being. Thus, Biko wrote,

the black people of the world, in choosing to reject the legacy of colonialism and white domination and to build around themselves their own values, standards, outlook to life, have at last established a solid base for meaningful cooperation amongst themselves in the larger battle of the Third World against the rich nations. (Biko, 1978 / 1987 , pp. 71–72)

Consciousness of Blackness as Intellectual Heritage

One of the most glaring omissions of present-day South Africa is the absence of Black intellectual history in the public and academic discourse. The marginalization of this intellectual history goes as far back as the nineteenth century, and so do the critiques of the colonial nature of African education. Tiyo Soga, the first African university graduate and an ordained minister in Scotland, admonished educated Africans for abandoning their culture: “You Xhosas, Thembus and Fingos who have accepted the word of heaven should not be accused of lack of respect to those who deserve respect as chiefs or lack of honouring those who deserve honour.” He cautioned against the substitution of foreign words for isi Xhosa: “Again if we had a say in this matter we would suggest that words like molo (good morning), rhoyindara (gooi dag), rhoyinani (gooi nag)…should be eliminated from our language” (Soga, as quoted in Williams, 1983 , pp. 172–173).

He urged African intellectuals to conduct research into their traditions, languages, and value systems:

Our veterans of the Xhosa and Embo people must disgorge all they know. Everything must be imparted to the nation as a whole. Fables must be retold; what was history or legend should be recounted…Whatever was seen or done under the requirements of custom should be brought to light and placed on the national table to be sifted for preservation.…Let us bring to life our ancestors: Ngconde, Togu, Tshiwo, Phalo, Rharhabe, Mlawu, Ngqika, Ndlambe. Let us resurrect our ancestral forebears who bequeathed to us a rich heritage. All anecdotes connected with the life of the nation should be brought to this big corn-pit, our national newspaper, Indaba. (See Opland & Mtuze, 1994 , pp. 79–82 for the full Xhosa text)

Many Black intellectuals emerged in the subsequent decades. Soga’s son, Alan Kirkland, authored a 500-page history book which was never published (Saunders, 1988 ). Kirkland’s colleague, Walter Rubusana, wrote the classic Zemnk’ Inkomo Magwalandini (Rubusana, 1906/2002 ) which provided details of the origins of African clans. John Henderson Soga wrote the magisterial South-Eastern Bantu (Soga, 1930 ). Soga’s worthiest successor was the renowned S.E.K. Mqhayi ( 1914 ), arguably the most prolific Black intellectual of the early twentieth century—poet and co-author of the national anthem, Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika ; novelist and author of the first African language novel, Ityala Lamawele [The Lawsuit of the Twins]; and long-time newspaper editor and columnist. He reiterated Soga’s call for a new Black historical consciousness:

A person who knows nothing of the historical events of his people lives his life with blunt teeth, he can’t really get his teeth into anything he does. The person has been taught that his chiefs are sly and he believes it; he has been taught that the great men of his nation steal, that they are thieves, cowards, liars; and he believes it. He does not realize that in so doing they are misleading him into abandoning his fathers and his chiefs. (Mqhayi, as cited in Opland, 2009 , p. 28)

Mqhayi blamed the Eurocentric curriculum of the missionary colleges for the miseducation of African children:

[I]n all our training schools the history of only one nation is taught, the English; they are the only people with intelligence, prudence, knowledge, they alone have national heroes, they have never been defeated by any other nation on earth; they claim as theirs even those things that clearly did not originate with them, and in this way they indoctrinate nations who do not appreciate their awe of the English is exaggerated, that their respect for them is excessive. That is why a fool runs wild when he discovers them to be empty vessels, recalling all the years he honoured them where no honour was due. (Mqhayi, as cited in Opland, 2009 , p. 18)

Robert Sobukwe identified the university as the best place from which to undertake African intellectual history. As president of the Fort Hare Student Representative Council, Sobukwe gave the celebrated Completers Social speech in 1948. He called for the transformation of the university into a ‘barometer of African thought’:

It has always been my feeling that if it is the intention of the Trustees of this College to make it an African college or university, as I have been informed it is, then the Department of African Studies must be more highly and more rapidly developed. Fort Hare must become the centre of African studies to which students in African studies must come from all over Africa. We should also have a department of economics and a department of sociology. A nation to be a nation needs specialists in these things. (Sobukwe, as quoted in Pogrund, 2006 , pp. 33–34)

He questioned the predominance of Europeans on the staff and the all-too-often response that it would take time to create a genuinely African university:

After the college has been in existence for thirty years the ratio of European to African staff is four to one. And we are told that in 10 years’ time we might become an independent university. Are we to understand by that an African university predominantly guided by European thought and informed by European staff? I said last year that Fort Hare must be to the African what Stellenbosch [University] is to the Afrikaner. It must be the barometer of African thought (Sobukwe, as quoted in Pogrund, 2006 , p. 34)

Biko sounded a similar call when he wrote about the importance of writing about African history:

We need to re-write our history and describe in it the heroes that formed the core of the resistance to the white invaders. More has to be revealed and stress has to be laid on the successful nation building attempts by people like Shaka, Moshoeshoe and Hintsa. Our culture must be described in concrete terms. We must relate the past to the present and demonstrate an historical evolution of the modern African. (Biko 1978 / 1987 , p. 70)

I have provided here only the rough lineaments of Blackness as self-knowledge—by Black people of their history and by the nation of its intellectual and cultural heritage. This omission is to the detriment of the nation as a whole and precludes giving substantive content to the idea of ‘joint culture.’ As Biko observed, South Africa still looked like “a province of Europe” (Biko, 1978 / 1987 , p. 131). The question is not whether the cultural character of the country had to change but in what ways.

Consciousness of Blackness as Self-Reliant Development—Latin American influences

Despite the emphasis on Frantz Fanon, Biko was more influenced by Paulo Freire than any other thinker in the Global South. His introduction to Freire was something of a happenstance. In 1970, Biko and Ben Khoapa approached the head of the Christian Institute, Beyers Naudé, to take over the Study Project on Christianity in Apartheid Society (Spro-cas). The project was about to come to its end when the two men came up with the idea of turning it into a community development vehicle—Black Community Programmes (BCP)—for the Black Consciousness movement. One of the Institute’s employees was a young White woman, Anne Hope, who specialized in Freire’s ( 1985 ) methodology of conscientization as the method of community education and action. Conscientization refers to the ways in which ordinary people developed a capacity for critical consciousness as a prelude to changing the conditions of their existence. This involved an iterative process of reflection and action, in which ideas inform action and action informs ideas.

Through literacy programmes people could be taught not only to read and write but to develop capabilities for self-development. Biko was particularly attracted by the connection Freire made between the liberation of the individual self and that of the community. As Biko put it in one of his essays, “the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed” (Biko, 1978 / 1987 , p. 92). No prior liberation movement had paid as much attention to individual consciousness as the sine qua non for community action. And so it was that the movement established literary projects in South Africa’s far flung rural areas and townships. By 1972, SASO was running schools in Umtata and Alice in the Eastern Cape province, and in the squatter community of Winterveld in the Transvaal. In addition to the physical projects, the students organized home education schemes for adults who wanted to obtain higher educational certificates.

The Freirean method was central to the Black Consciousness strategy of leadership building. As each layer of leadership was removed from action, by the government through detentions or killings, it was necessary to have another layer ready to step up. Anne Hope ran training classes for the leadership including the likes of Biko, Saths Cooper, and Barney Pityana.

The fact that Biko would be taking lessons from a young White woman is further proof of the comfort he had in his skin. However, it seems that no number of examples will suffice to convince some of the radicals who speak in his name that Biko was not a racialist.

The BCP also opened a research and publications department which oversaw the publication of books and journals such as Creativity and Development, Essays on Black Theology, Black Viewpoint , and Black Perspectives . In 1972, Biko edited a special issue of Black Viewpoint with essays by Njabulo Ndebele, Gatsha Buthelezi, CMC Ndamse and Ben Khoapa. He explained the rationale for the publication as follows: “We have felt and observed in the past the existence of a great vacuum in our literary world and newspapers. So many things are said so often to us, about us and for us, but seldom by us. This has created a dependency mood among us which has given rise to the present tendency to look at ourselves” (Biko, 1972 , p. 7). He was also quick to warn against the tendency to criticize the White press if Black people did not themselves establish their own institutions. He wrote: “We blacks must on our own develop those agencies that we need, and not look up to unsympathetic and often hostile quarters to offer these to us in terms of how we are interpreted by the white press” (Biko, 1972 , p. 8).

The movement also established community health projects, the most famous of which was the Zanempilo Health Clinic in Zinyoka Village outside King William’s Town, under the leadership of Mamphela Ramphele. The BCP also ran day-care centres, including one in Biko’s home township (and the author’s own), Ginsberg. He described this project as follows:

For instance where I stay in King William’s Town we revived a community crèche, which was serving a basic need for the community in that a number of mothers could not go to work because they had to look after their babies and toddlers. Or if they go to work it implies that kids who are supposed to be school-going must stay behind looking after the toddlers. So that it became clear to us that there was a need to provide a crèche to that community. And we revived a crèche which I attended actually when I was young…but it had gone defunct…we call it the Ginsberg Creche. (Biko, as quoted in Arnold, 1978 , p. 94)

What was even more important for Biko was the psychological empowerment of the locals by these initiatives; empowerment that in turn heightened their political consciousness:

We believe that black people, as they rub shoulders with the particular project, as they benefit from that project, with their perception of it, they begin to ask themselves questions and we surely believe that they are going to give themselves answers, and they understand, you know that this kind of lesson has been a lesson for me, I must have hope. In most of the projects we tend to pass over the maintenance to the community. (Biko, as quoted in Arnold, 1978 , p. 94).

The BCP also established home-based leather-making industries. These produced belts, purses, handbags, and upholstery. Women who would ordinarily remain unemployed were brought together and taught sewing skills and encouraged to produce articles for which they were paid according to their production. The BCP subsidized the purchase of materials and machines. By 1975 the home industries were approaching the stage where they would not need subsidies anymore, except for expansion.

A community self-tax fund, known as Zimele Trust, was also established to support people who had just been released from prison as they tried to settle in the community. These individuals would then be employed in the movement’s own home industries and those who wanted to study were provided with scholarships (Mangcu, 2012 ).

In 1999 I joined with Biko’s family to establish the Steve Biko Foundation with the aim of reviving these programs in his hometown in the Eastern Cape province. The Foundation soon grew to be a household name in South Africa, not only in advocating Biko’s memory, but also through its youth development programs. The Foundation addressed conscientization by establishing the Ginsberg History Project in his hometown. Young people were encouraged to interview older people and write stories about the history of development in the community. The history projects inspired other projects in education, health, business development, and sports. The Foundation partnered with the University of Fort Hare School of Management on a program of youth leadership development. Partnerships with international institutions, such as the Ford Foundation, the Clinton Democracy Initiative, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology enabled some of the young people to travel outside of the country. One of them obtained a graduate degree in public health from Boston University. She now leads an international non-governmental organization specializing in the battle against HIV and AIDS.

The Foundation also ran a highly successful public lecture series that included speakers such as Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Nelson Mandela. The lectures gave young people an opportunity to interact with these leaders. As I put it in my biography of Biko, “The important thing about these initiatives is that they gave young people a sense of identity and self-confidence” (Mangcu 2014 , p. 315).

Consciousness of Blackness as Anti-racism

When I was preparing the Biko biography, I asked the respected lawyer, Geoff Budlender, who had known Biko, to write something about his impact on the White community. Budlender spoke at length about how the Black Consciousness challenge to Whites to organize in their own communities transformed the political culture of White radical politics. The first change was the shift from protest action to using White resources and skills to empower Black organizations. If Black students or workers needed legal aid, then there would be well-trained White lawyers available to provide assistance but not leadership. He further noted that:

What Biko said more than 25 years ago remains relevant today, in at least two senses. First, white power and privilege remain potent. Biko’s message reminds us that white people carry the benefits and the burden of that legacy. White arrogance is sometimes thinly disguised as a non-racial critique of the new (black) holders of power in government and elsewhere. Humility does not come easily to the privileged. We continue to see an arrogance which fails to recognise the generosity which black South Africans have shown their white counterparts, and which also fails to recognise that our democratic constitution did not produce social transformation - rather, it created one of the necessary preconditions for the transformation which must still come. (Budlender, as cited in Mangcu, 2012 , p. 149)

One of the mechanisms that has been devised to deal with racial exclusion has been the policy of affirmative action. However, affirmative action is too often seen as a matter of addressing social inequality, and does not deal with the underlying questions of racial identity and what it means to young people. This near-exclusive focus on inequality falls into the trap of treating race as an epiphenomenon—as no more than the underlying economic and social processes. This leaves unaddressed the attack on the dignity and self-worth of Black people irrespective of their class status. In such a context, affirmative action ought to be reconfigured as a recognition of the substantive presence of Blackness—a consciousness of Blackness by Black and White people alike. As Patricia Williams ( 1995 , p. 121) argues, affirmative action would be about a recognition of Blacks as a “social presence that is profoundly linked to the fate of blacks and whites and women and men either as subgroups or as one group.”

This conception of affirmative action as Consciousness of Blackness has relevance for young people in the Global South. Anderson notes “the scientific condemnation of racial mixing in South Africa in the 1920s and 1930s certainly has no parallel elsewhere in the Global South” (Anderson, 2014 , p. 788–789). As a result, it has been easier for scholars to compare South Africa with the United States with its similarly rigid approach to racial formation. However, Anderson also suggests that there may be value in comparing South Africa with other countries in the Global South. Although there have been studies of the colonial networks that existed among British colonists in Australia (New South Wales) and South Africa (the Cape), these have focused more on how race was defined from the top. Of greater relevance for the project of Consciousness of Blackness are the networks that existed among the colonized—such as the inspiration that the Black Consciousness movement drew from Freire.

There are also parallels between the Black Consciousness movement and the Black Movement in Brazil in the 1970s. As in South Africa, Brazil’s Black Movement emerged as a response to and a rejection of the standard theories of racial formation in Brazil from the racist theories of racial whitening to the liberal view that race would disappear with capitalist development to the Marxist-structuralist view that, though important, race was secondary to class (Winant, 1988 ).

As with Black Consciousness, the Black Movement in Brazil emerged under the cover of undertaking merely developmental projects. As Winant notes:

For many people, especially those of humble origin whom the traditional political processes had been able to ignore, the new social movements provided the first political experience of their lives. For those of the middle classes…the new social movements offered a political alternative to leftist and populist traditions which the military dictatorship had effectively stalemated. (1988, p. 186)

As in South Africa’s Black Consciousness movement, these movements grew from the favelas [urban slums] of Brazil to engage in discussions of the centrality of racial identity to their experiences. These conversations took place across the wide spectrum of Brazil’s Black communities—among students, intellectuals, Black feminists, in trade unions, and in the Church—culminating in the formation of the Movimento Negro Unificado [Unified Black Movement] (MNU) in 1978. Like many other movements, the MNU was split into different factions. Also, there were allegations of co-optation against some of the leaders who entered parliamentary politics. Alongside the MNU were more localized movements such as the Afoxés which organized around African-Brazilian identity. The closest analogue to Black Consciousness was the ‘black soul’ movement of the 1960s, both in terms of their emphasis on Black cultural pride and their focus on youth.

When I led the Steve Biko Foundation, I visited the offices of the Brazilian cultural musical group Olodum based in Bahia, Salvador. The aim was to build a partnership between the Foundation and Olodum . This cultural group provides the best example of a movement in the Global South that promotes Consciousness of Blackness. Through its music, Olodum explicitly accentuates Brazil’s African heritage. By so doing, Olodum “presents a concept of black identity which radically challenges traditional concepts of race in Brazil. Its deliberate evocation of the African diaspora explicitly refuses the official Brazilian racial ideology in all its forms” (Dominguez, 2018 , p. 366). And because of its popularity as a musical group—it worked with Michael Jordan for his song What About Us—the group’s valorization of Black identity reaches millions of people. It has thus become what Winant calls a national afoxé . However, success always invites criticism. Olodum was criticized for being commercial, just as the Steve Biko Foundation was criticized for making Biko a so-called ‘fashion icon.’ This could be seen as an indication of success in taking Biko from the doldrums of national memory to the public consciousness.

The elements of Consciousness of Blackness can be an antidote. The intellectual project can be an antidote to the anti-intellectualism that has gripped a society gripped by materialism; the technocratic approach that views community development as no more than bricks and mortar; and the many ways in which racism continues to rear its ugly head.

The Pitfalls of a Nihilistic Radicalism

For such a programmatic agenda to succeed, youth leaders would have to go beyond a nihilistic radicalism that is contemptuous of past experiences, disrespectful of past heroes, and ignorant of history. This radicalism would come to devour the promise of the youth movement that emerged as #Fallism in South Africa.

When they emerged, the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements of the past few years were some of the most inspiring youth movements to emerge in South Africa since the 1980s. When the #Fallists launched their campaign to remove the statue of Cecil John Rhodes from the premises of the University of Cape Town, they invited me to co-chair the rally. This was a consequence of years of writing calling for the transformation of the universities. The chairman of the movement, Kgotsi Chikane, wrote: “your words and writings are what inspire many students about their race on campus.”

I declined the invitation because I did not think it would be appropriate for me to be co-chairing what was essentially a student initiative, and offered to say a few words of support instead. The students subsequently invited me to speak to them in the offices of the Vice Chancellor—which they had occupied and vowed never to leave until the statue came down. I was happy to do it. I was also impressed by their unity of purpose. However, as a veteran of student movements, I also worried about the dangers that lay ahead. What if the university decided to take the statue down, what would happen to the movement? In other words, did they have a long-term programmatic agenda that would survive the falling of the statue. In a sense I was asking them to make a distinction between short-term tactical objectives and the strategic goal of changing the broader culture of the university.

The university agreed to remove the statue, and just as predicted, the student movement began to splinter into factions. Debates about race, class, gender, and sexuality that they had not discussed tore them apart. The radicals shut down everyone who disagreed with them. They burnt university buses and set fire to the university’s art collection. On other campuses students burnt libraries. I was transformed from being the country’s leading supporter of the movement to being a ‘sell out,’ an ‘Uncle Tom,’ a ‘House Nigger’ because I disagreed with the violence.

When I invited the distinguished author Ngugi wa Thiong’o to speak about decolonization, the #Fallists threatened to shut down the talk unless he was willing to tell the Whites to leave the auditorium. Embarrassed for Ngugi, I intervened asking them to stop such demands and Ngugi wisely told them he could not do such a thing, and asked them why they could not present their critiques in the presence of the Whites in the room. When I identified a White speaker during question time they howled the person down. Quite frankly, because of the racial gradations in the Western Cape part of South Africa, I was not even sure if the person was Coloured or White, not that it would have made much of a difference. Throughout the disruption they claimed to be speaking in the name of Steve Biko and Robert Sobukwe. The event highlighted the urgency of paying attention to Black intellectual history.

The attacks on history can be seen in the unrelenting attacks on Nelson Mandela as a sell-out and worse. Masquerading as a radical, a prominent artist recently painted Mandela in the likeness of Adolf Hitler. He defended his actions by describing Mandela as a black-skinned Nazi “who looked like us, talked like us and walked among us, left us unseeing, left us as zombies and black dust” (Ho, 2018 ). As Mandela lay on his deathbed another self-declared radical, Malaika wa Azania protested, “Mandela must not die yet. No no no. People don’t get away with crime. Neither must he” (Bundy 2019 , p. 997).

In their denigration of Mandela, the youth radicals claim to be speaking in Biko’s name. But Biko was never confused about Mandela’s stature in the Black imagination:

Clearly black people know that that their leaders are those people who are now either in Robben Island or in banishment or in exile – voluntary or otherwise. People like Mandela, Sobukwe, Kathrada, MD Naidoo and many others will have a place of honour in our minds…these were people who acted with a dedication unparalleled in modern times. Their concern with our plight as black people made them gain the natural support of the mass of black people. We may disagree with some things they did but know that they spoke the language of the people (Biko, 1978 / 1987 , p. 37)

But the most often cited radical voice is that of Fanon, specifically that “each generation must, out of its relative obscurity, discover its own mission” (Fanon 1961 , p. 206). And yet in the very next lines Fanon warns:

We must rid ourselves of the habit, now that we are in the thick of the fight, of minimizing the action of our fathers or of feigning incomprehension when considering their silence and passivity. They fought as well as they could, with the arms that they possessed then; and if the echoes of their struggle have not resounded in the international arena, we must realize that the reason for this silence lies less in their lack of heroism than in the fundamentally different international situation of our time. (Fanon 1961 , p. 206)

Fanon also cautioned against the racial nativists who often speak in his name, especially on the topic of “African culture than of national culture” (Fanon, 1961 , p. 152).

In her novel, The God of Small Things , Arundhati Roy captures the challenge facing young and old alike in the Global South. There is a break in the historical transmission of memory and experience. The young are “trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away” (Roy 1997 , p. 51). Retracing those steps is critical if youth in the Global South are to reshape the world. The Consciousness of Blackness could be a giant step in that new direction. As a concluding remark, orthodox Black Consciousness advocates may be surprised by the suggestion of any changes to their philosophy. But then again, every major philosophy—from liberalism to Marxism to Christianity—has undergone one transformation or another—if only to remain relevant to changing times.

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David Brooks

The Sins of the Educated Class

A large group of students in black caps and gowns at a commencement ceremony.

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

When I was young, I was a man on the left. In the early 1980s, I used to go to the library and read early 20th-century issues of left-wing magazines like The Masses and The New Republic. I was energized by stories of workers fighting for their rights against the elites — at Haymarket, at the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, on the railways where the Pullman sleeping car porters struggled for decent wages a few years after that. My heroes were all on the left: John Reed, Clifford Odets, Frances Perkins and Hubert Humphrey.

But I got out of college and realized we didn’t live in the industrial age; we live in the information age. The center of progressive energy moved from the working class to the universities, and not just any universities, but the elite universities.

By now we’re used to the fact that the elite universities are places that attract and produce progressives. Working-class voters now mostly support Donald Trump, but at Harvard, America’s richest university, 65 percent of students identify as progressive or very progressive, according to a May 2023 survey of the graduating class.

Today, we’re used to the fact that elite places are shifting further and further to the left. Writing for The Harvard Crimson, Julien Berman used A.I. to analyze opinion pieces in college newspapers for their ideological content. “Opinions of student writers at elite universities” in 2000, he found , “weren’t all that more progressive than those at nonelite ones.” But by 2023, opinions at The Crimson had grown about two and a half times more progressive than they were in 2001. More generally, Berman concluded, “Opinion sections at elite universities have gotten significantly more progressive, and they’ve outrun their nonelite counterparts.”

Today, we’re used to the fact that students at elite universities have different interests and concerns than students at less privileged places. The researchers Marc Novicoff and Robert Kelchen in May published an investigative report in The Washington Monthly titled “Are Gaza Protests Happening Mostly at Elite Colleges?” They surveyed 1,421 public and private colleges and concluded, “The answer is a resounding yes.”

A few schools with a large number of lower-income students, they found, had Gaza protests, “but in the vast majority of cases, campuses that educate students mostly from working-class backgrounds have not had any protest activity.” Among private schools, encampments and protests “have taken place almost exclusively at schools where poorer students are scarce and the listed tuitions and fees are exorbitantly high.”

I went to an elite university and have taught at them. I find them wonderful in most ways and deeply screwed up in a few ways. But over the decades and especially recently, I’ve found the elite, educated-class progressivism a lot less attractive than the working-class progressivism of Frances Perkins that I read about when I was young. Like a lot of people, I’ve looked on with a kind of dismay as elite university dynamics have spread across national life and politics, making America worse in all sorts of ways. Let me try to be more specific about these dynamics.

The first is false consciousness. To be progressive is to be against privilege. But today progressives dominate elite institutions like the exclusive universities, the big foundations and the top cultural institutions. American adults who identify as very progressive skew white, well educated and urban and hail from relatively advantaged backgrounds.

This is the contradiction of the educated class. Virtue is defined by being anti-elite. But today’s educated class constitutes the elite, or at least a big part of it. Many of the curiosities of our culture flow as highly educated people try to resolve the contradiction between their identity as an enemy of privilege, and the fact that, at least educationally and culturally, and often economically, they are privileged.

Imagine you’re a social justice-oriented student or a radical sociologist, but you attend or work at a university with a $50 billion endowment, immense social power and the ability to reject about 95 percent of the people who apply. For years or decades, you worked your tail off to get into the most exclusive aeries in American life, but now you’ve got to prove, to yourself and others, that you’re on the side of the oppressed.

Imagine you graduated from a prestigious liberal arts college with a degree in history and you get a job as a teacher at an elite Manhattan private school. You’re a sincere progressive down to your bones. Unfortunately, your job is to take the children of rich financiers and polish them up so they can get into Stanford. In other words, your literal job is to reinforce privilege.

This sort of cognitive dissonance often has a radicalizing effect. When your identity is based on siding with the marginalized, but you work at Horace Mann or Princeton, you have to work really hard to make yourself and others believe you are really progressive. You’re bound to drift further and further to the left to prove you are standing up to the man.

This, I think, explains the following phenomenon: Society pours hundreds of thousands of dollars into elite students, gives them the most prestigious launching pads fathomable, and they are often the ones talking most loudly about burning the system down.

This also explains, I think, the leftward drift of the haute bourgeoisie. As the sociologist Musa al-Gharbi puts it in his forthcoming book, “ We Have Never Been Woke ”: “After 2011, there were dramatic changes in how highly educated white liberals answered questions related to race and ethnicity. These shifts were not matched among non-liberal or non-Democrat whites, nor among nonwhites of any political or ideological persuasion. By 2020, highly educated white liberals tended to provide more ‘woke’ responses to racial questions than the average Black or Hispanic person.”

Progressivism has practically become an entry ticket into the elite. A few years ago, a Yale admissions officer wrote, “For those students who come to Yale, we expect them to be versed in issues of social justice.” Recently Tufts included an optional essay prompt that explicitly asked applicants what they were doing to advance social justice.

Over the years the share of progressive students and professors has steadily risen, and the share of conservatives has approached zero. Progressives have created places where they never have to encounter beliefs other than their own. At Harvard, 82 percent of progressives say that all or almost all of their close friends share their political beliefs.

A lot of us in the center left or the center right don’t want to live amid this much conformity. We don’t see history as a zero-sum war between oppressor and oppressed. We still believe in a positive-sum society where all people can see their lives improve together.

The second socially harmful dynamic is what you might call the cultural consequences of elite overproduction. Over the past few decades, elite universities have been churning out very smart graduates who are ready to use their minds and sensibilities to climb to the top of society and change the world. Unfortunately, the marketplace isn’t producing enough of the kinds of jobs these graduates think they deserve.

The elite college grads who go into finance, consulting and tech do smashingly well, but the grads who choose less commercial sectors often struggle. Social activists in Washington and other centers of influence have to cope with sky-high rents. Newspapers and other news websites are laying off journalists. Academics who had expected to hold a prestigious chair find themselves slaving away as adjunct professors.

In a series of essays culminating in his book “End Times: Elites, Counter Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration,” Peter Turchin argued that periods of elite overproduction lead to a rising tide of social decay as alienated educated-class types wage ever more ferocious power struggles with other elites. This phenomenon most likely contributed to surges in social protest during the late 1960s, the late 1980s and then around 2010. Research using Google nGrams shows that discourse mentioning “racism” spiked around each of these three periods.

Elite overproduction was especially powerful during the period after the financial crisis. In the early 2010s, highly educated white liberals increasingly experienced a disproportionate rise in depression, anxiety and negative emotions. This was accompanied by a sharp shift to the left in their political views. The spread of cancel culture, as well as support for decriminalizing illegal immigration and “defunding the police” were among the quintessential luxury beliefs that seemed out of touch to people in less privileged parts of society. Those people often responded by making a sharp counter-shift in the populist direction, contributing to the election of Donald Trump and to his continued political viability today.

As a nonprogressive member of the educated class, I’d say that elite overproduction induces people on the left and the right to form their political views around their own sense of personal grievance and alienation. It launches unhappy progressives and their populist enemies into culture war battles that help them feel engaged, purposeful and good about themselves, but it seems to me that these battles are often more about performative self-validation than they are about practical policies that might serve the common good.

The third dynamic is the inflammation of the discourse. The information age has produced a vast cohort of people (including me) who live by trafficking in ideas — academics, journalists, activists, foundation employees, consultants and the various other shapers of public opinion. People in other sectors measure themselves according to whether they can build houses or care for seniors in a nursing home, but people in our crowd often measure ourselves by our beliefs — having the right beliefs, pioneering new beliefs, staying up-to-date on the latest beliefs, vanquishing the beliefs we have decided are the wrong beliefs.

Nothing is more unstable than a fashionable opinion. If your status is defined by your opinions, you’re living in a world of perpetual insecurity, perpetual mental and moral war. The man who saw all this coming was the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who started his major works with a book called “Distinction” in 1979.

Bourdieu argued that just as economic capitalists use their resource — wealth — to amass prestige and power, people who form the educated class and the cultural elite, symbolic capitalists, use our resources — beliefs, fancy degrees, linguistic abilities — to amass prestige, power and, if we can get it, money.

Symbolic capitalists, Bourdieu continued, wage daily battles of consecration, battles over what will be admired and what will be disdained, who gets to be counted among the elect and who is counted among the damned.

Bourdieu’s work is so powerful because it shows how symbolic capitalists turned political postures into power tools that enable them to achieve social, cultural and economic might. If exchanging viewpoints is turned into a struggle for social position, then of course conversation will assume the brutality of all primate dominance contests.

These sorts of battles for symbolic consecration are now the water in which many of us highly educated Americans swim. In the absence of religious beliefs, these moral wars give people a genuine sense of meaning and purpose. They give people a way of acting in the world that they hope will shift beliefs and produce a better society.

But it’s awful to live in a perpetual state of cultural war, and it’s awful to live in a continual state of social fear. The inflammation of the discourse serves the psychic and social self-interests of the combatants, but it polarizes society by rendering a lot of people in the center silent, causing them to keep their heads down in order to survive.

Will these three dynamics continue to drive American society batty?

I can tell a story in which those of us in the educated class, progressive or not, come to address the social, political and economic divides we have unwittingly created.

In this reality we would face up to the fact that all societies have been led by this or that elite group and that in the information age those who have a lot of education have immense access to political, cultural and economic power. We would be honest about our role in widening inequalities. We would abhor cultural insularity and go out of our way to engage with people across ideology and class. We would live up to our responsibilities as elites and care for the whole country, not just ourselves. Most important, we would dismantle the arrangements that enable people in our class to pass down our educational privileges to our children, generation after generation, while locking out most everyone else.

That would mean changing the current college admissions criteria, so they no longer massively favor affluent young kids whose parents invest in them from birth. That would also mean opening up many other pathways so that more people would find it easier to climb the social ladder even if they didn’t get into a selective college at age 18.

But there is another possible future. Perhaps today’s educated elite is just like any other historical elite. We gained our status by exploiting or not even seeing others down below, and we are sure as hell not going to give up any of our status without a fight.

To see how likely this second possibility is, I urge you to preorder al-Gharbi’s “We Have Never Been Woke.” It comes out this fall, and it announces him as a rising intellectual star.

I really can’t tell what al-Gharbi’s politics are — some mixture of positions from across the spectrum maybe. He does note that he is writing from the tradition of Black thinkers — stretching back to W.E.B. Du Bois — who argue that white liberals use social justice issues to build status and make themselves feel good while ultimately offering up “little more than symbolic gestures and platitudes to redress the material harms they decry (and often exacerbate).”

He observes that today’s educated-class activists are conveniently content to restrict their political action to the realm of symbols. In his telling, land acknowledgments — when people open public events by naming the Indigenous peoples who had their land stolen from them — are the quintessential progressive gesture.

It’s often non-Indigenous people signaling their virtue to other non-Indigenous people while doing little or nothing for the descendants of those who were actually displaced. Educated elites rename this or that school to erase the names of disfavored historical figures, but they don’t improve the education that goes on within them. Student activists stage messy protests on campus but don’t even see the custodial staff who will clean up afterward.

Al-Gharbi notes that Black people made most of their progress between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s, before the rise of the educated class in the late 1960s, and that the educated class may have derailed that progress. He notes that gaps in wealth and homeownership between white and Black Americans have grown larger since 1968.

He suggests that educated elites practice their own form of trickle-down economics. They imagine that giving diverse college grads university administration jobs and other social justice sinecures will magically benefit the disadvantaged people who didn’t go to college.

He charges that while members of the educated class do a lot of moral preening, their lifestyles contribute to the immiserations of the people who have nearly been rendered invisible — the Amazon warehouse worker, the DoorDash driver making $1.75 an hour after taxes and expenses.

That rumbling sound you hear is the possibility of a multiracial, multiprong, right/left alliance against the educated class. Donald Trump has already created the nub of this kind of movement but is himself too polarizing to create a genuinely broad-based populist movement. After Trump is off the stage it’s very possible to imagine such an uprising.

Ruh-roh. The lesson for those of us in the educated class is to seriously reform the system we have created or be prepared to be run over.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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David Brooks has been a columnist with The Times since 2003. He is the author, most recently, of “How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.” @ nytdavidbrooks

10 noteworthy books for June

A witty essay collection and thrilling historical fiction await you.

Great new reads for June include a lavish thriller set in the international art world, historical fiction in Renaissance Italy and a medical mystery memoir from a young mother.

‘I’ve Tried Being Nice: Essays,’ by Ann Leary

Leary had an epiphany while dealing with a neighbor whose off-leash dogs were wreaking havoc. As she delivered a stern warning — “Look, I’ve tried being nice …” — the inveterate people-pleaser suddenly understood one of the benefits of getting older: the power of indifference. In funny and unpretentious essays on topics that include selling a beloved house, interacting with fans of her famous husband, Denis, becoming an empty nester and recovering from alcoholism, Leary shares stories from a lifetime of wanting to be liked. (Marysue Rucci, June 4)

‘Malas,’ by Marcela Fuentes

Set in a border town on the Texas side of the Rio Grande, Fuentes’s lively novel explores the intergenerational connection between two strong women. Lulu Muñoz is trying to keep her punk rock band a secret from her substance-abusing father while avoiding thoughts of her garish upcoming quinceañera celebration. When the enigmatic Pilar makes a surprise appearance at a funeral, she and Lulu form a friendship that leads to unexpected discoveries. (Viking, June 4)

‘Hell Gate Bridge: A Memoir of Motherhood, Madness, and Hope,’ by Barrie Miskin

Miskin’s searing memoir about her experience with a mysterious mental illness during and after her pregnancy provides a haunting window into the state of health care in the United States. Having weaned herself from antidepressants as a precaution before pregnancy, Miskin began an alarming descent into delusions and suicidal ideation which continued after her baby was born. A proper diagnosis of a rare and incurable disorder began her journey away from darkness, allowing her to fully experience being a wife, teacher and mother. (Woodhall Press, June 4)

‘Service,’ by Sarah Gilmartin

When Daniel, one of Dublin’s top chefs, faces accusations of sexual assault, Hannah’s mind returns to the summer she spent waitressing at his high-end restaurant — the excitement of the glamorous dining room, the pressures of the kitchen and the wild parties after hours, where something sinister happened that changed her life. Meanwhile, Daniel’s wife, Julie, is hiding from the paparazzi and trying to understand the allegations against the man she loves. In alternating chapters, Gilmartin gives voice to Daniel, Hannah and Julie, perceptively delving into issues of silence, complicity and the aftermath of violence. (Pushkin Press, June 4)

‘The Throne,’ by Franco Bernini, translated by Oonagh Stransky

The first in a planned trilogy, Bernini’s engrossing historical novel follows Machiavelli’s trajectory through the corridors of power in 16th-century Italy. Sent by the Florentine Republic to spy on the plotting Cesare Borgia, Machiavelli shrewdly accepts a proposal to chronicle Borgia’s life story. As the relationship between the biographer and his subject evolves, each man relies on the other to achieve his political ambitions, yet only one will succeed. (Europa, June 11)

‘The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby,’ by Ellery Lloyd

Lloyd’s engaging historical mystery moves swiftly between pre-World War II Parisian art studios, the elite academic corridors of early 1990s Cambridge University and present-day Dubai, where a controversial masterpiece by British heiress and surrealist artist Juliette Willoughby appears on display after it was presumed lost in the fire that claimed her life. Art history scholars had been suspicious about the truth behind the painting’s loss, and the continuing investigation — with possible ties to a murder — uncovers scandalous secrets that someone might go to great lengths to keep quiet. (Harper, June 11)

‘Moonbound,’ by Robin Sloan

The author of “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore” returns with a far-flung sci-fi adventure that begins 11,000 years in the future, when animals can talk and genetic manipulators called wizards rule. After 12-year-old Ariel fails to comply with a wizard’s directive to remove a sword from a stone, he is forced to flee the only place he has ever known in the company of a sentient ancient artifact whose purpose is to contain all the knowledge of human history. Ariel and his companion set out on a quest to save his home from the vindictive wizard, encountering danger and finding new friendships along the way. (MCD, June 11)

‘God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer,’ by Joseph Earl Thomas

Joseph Thomas — not the author but the novel’s similarly-named protagonist — is many things: an Iraq Army veteran; a single father; an emergency room technician at a North Philadelphia hospital; an Ivy-league student of medicine; and a Black man trying to find his place in a country that often judges him unfairly. Struggling to maintain balance between the incessant obligations of work, school and fatherhood, his everyday encounters are a continuous reminder of the difficulties he has faced while trying to build a life for himself. Joseph’s travails, told in a forceful stream of consciousness, expose the daily rhythms, obstacles and joys of one man’s life. (Grand Central, June 18)

‘Hombrecito,’ by Santiago Jose Sanchez

Sanchez’s powerful first novel follows a young boy from Colombia to the United States and back again as he struggles with abandonment issues, acclimating to a new homeland and grappling with his own queer sexual awakening. With a “father-shaped hole” in his heart, he pushes away from his single mother in a raucous attempt to define his own life. But accompanying her back to Colombia as an adult allows him to reconsider the childhood images he had of his parents — and perhaps find grace and acceptance. (Riverhead, June 25)

‘Husbands and Lovers,’ by Beatriz Williams

Single mother Mallory Dunne has just sent her 10-year-old son, Sam, off to summer camp when she gets an alarming call — her son has consumed a poisonous death cap mushroom. With Sam needing a new kidney that she can’t provide, Mallory’s only options are to contact Sam’s father, whom she hasn’t seen in more than a decade, or to locate her mother’s recently discovered birth family. In another timeline, Hannah Ainsworth, a traumatized World War II survivor married to a British diplomat in 1950s Egypt, finds comfort in the arms of the manager of one of the grandest hotels in Cairo, reawakening a part of her she thought was lost. The experiences of these women as mothers in two different times and places link them together in surprising ways. (Ballantine, June 25)

Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Denis Leary’s first name. The article has been corrected.

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Black Consciousness Movement (BCM)
On 12 September 1977, the Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko died while in the custody of security police. The period leading up to his death, beginning with the June 1976 unrest, had seen some of the most turbulent events in South African history, the first signs that the apartheid regime would not be able to maintain its oppressive rule without massive resistance.
Black Consciousness Movement
The Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa was born in SASO. Black consciousness, as defined by Biko, was the awakening of self-worth in Black populations. The movement's leaders hoped to redefine "Black," recognizing that the term was no longer a simple racial classification but a positive, unifying identity.
HSTORY T2 Gr. 12 Black Consciousness Essay
Grade 12: The Challenge of Black Consciousness to the Apartheid State (Essay) PPT. ... HSTORY T2 Gr. 12 Black Consciousness Essay . Free ... History Curriculum Advisors. Download. Type: pptx . Size: 11.68MB . Share this content. Grade 12: The Challenge of Black Consciousness to the Apartheid State (Essay) PPT ...
Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement
The Rise of Black Consciousness. The Black Consciousness movement became one of the most influential anti-apartheid movements of the 1970s in South Africa. While many parts of the African continent gained independence, the apartheid state increased its repression of black liberation movements in the 1960s. In the latter part of the decade, the ...
Black Consciousness Movement
The Black Consciousness Movement ... History. The Black Consciousness Movement started to develop during the late 1960s, and was led by Steve Biko, Mamphela Ramphele, and Barney Pityana ... This was a compilation of essays that were written by black people for black people.
Steve Biko and the philosophy of Black consciousness
This post is a winning entry in the LSE student writing competition Black Forgotten Heroes, launched by the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa. Born 18 December 1946, Steve Biko was a South African activist who pioneered the philosophy of Black Consciousness in the late 1960s. He later founded the South African Students Organisation (SASO) in ...
What was the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa?
The Black Consciousness Movement was a resistance movement during the apartheid era that restored the dignity of black South Africans. Aug 6, 2022 • By Greg Beyer, BA History & Linguistics, Journalism Diploma. A demonstrator holds up a poster tribute to BCM leader Steve Biko, via BBC. As colonialism in South Africa transformed into the ...
1970s: Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa
Many anti-apartheid leaders and supporters were in jail or had gone into exile. However, in the 1970s, a new movement called Black Consciousness or BC led to renewed resistance. The movement was led by a man called Steve Biko. BC encouraged all black South Africans to recognize their inherent dignity and self-worth.
PDF Steve Biko and the philosophy of Black consciousness
Steve Biko. Credit: South African History Online via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0. The philosophy of Black consciousness The Black Consciousness Mo vement centred on race as a determining fact or in the oppression of Black people in South Africa, in r esponse to racial oppression and the dehumanisation of Black people under Apar theid.
South Africa's Black Consciousness Movement
The Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) was an influential student movement in the 1970s in Apartheid South Africa. The Black Consciousness Movement promoted a new identity and politics of racial solidarity and became the voice and spirit of the anti-apartheid movement at a time when both the African National Congress and the Pan-Africanist Congress had been banned in the wake of the ...
Steve Biko: The Black Consciousness Movement
The SASO, BCP & BPC Years. Stephen Bantu Biko was an anti-apartheid activist in South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. A student leader, he later founded the Black Consciousness Movement which would empower and mobilize much of the urban black population. Since his death in police custody, he has been called a martyr of the anti-apartheid movement.
PDF New Perspectives on the history of Black Consciousness in South Africa
Theology, which facilitated one of Biko's first published essays, 'Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity' in a book edited by Mokgethi Motlhabi, called Essays on ... South Africans were the dominant voice on the history of Black Consciousness, publishing at least three accounts: writing from the United Kingdom the ...
The Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa
the Black People's Convention (B.P.C.) in order to spread their views to a wider community. According to Steve Biko, possibly the best known of the B.C. leaders, later to be murdered while in detention, and the subject of Richard Attenborough's film, 'Cry Freedom': Black Consciousness is in essence the realization by the black man of the need
The History of Black Consciousness
Abstract. Beginning with its roots in Bantu Education, this chapter sketches the rise and fall of Black Consciousness. Penfold summarises the diverse and complex influences behind this struggle ideology that was led by Steve Biko. Importantly, Penfold suggests that Black Consciousness must be fundamentally understood as a cultural movement.
Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement Grade 12 Essay Guide
Black Consciousness Movement Grade 12 Essay Guide (Question and Answers) and Summary: The Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) was a grassroots anti-Apartheid activist movement that emerged in South Africa in the mid-1960s out of the political vacuum created by the jailing and banning of the African National Congress and Pan Africanist Congress leadership after the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960.
Steve Biko Calls for Black Consciousness
Politically, the decade from 1960 to 1970 was a period of deafening silence among black South Africans. The freedom movements of the 1950s had been banned and their leaders imprisoned. In the late 1960s, new young leaders arose, bringing a fresh concept for organizing called "black consciousness.". Foremost among these activists was Steve Biko.
The Ideology of the Black Consciousness Movement
The Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa is synonymous with its founder, Biko. From the beginning of Biko's political life until his death, he remains one of the indisputable icons of the Black struggle against apartheid. As leader of the movement, he instilled courage among the masses to fight an unjust system under the banner of ...
16 From Black Consciousness to Consciousness of Blackness
Abstract. This essay argues for a revision of Black Consciousness philosophy to make it more consistent with the requirements of South Africa's constitutional democracy and relevant to the aspirations of young people in South Africa and the Global South.
BCM Essay
HISTORY GRADE 12 BPM ESSAY PAPER1 2022 BLACK POWER MOVEMENT ESSAY This essay entails of the Black Power Movement it validates the statement that non-violent strategy has been slow and that if they wanted to win the battle, they better use violence. This essay will discuss the reasons of the Black Power Movement,
History
Learn about the history of the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa with Ms M Nonkasa, a grade 12 teacher and historian.
Full article: Storying ourselves: Black Consciousness thought and
ABSTRACT. Mindful of 2020's global focus on questions of systemic racism, this article looks at the continuing salience of the South African activist Steve Biko's ideas about Black Consciousness and consciousness-raising as they impact young people's empowerment in African countries.
Opinion
Al-Gharbi notes that Black people made most of their progress between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s, before the rise of the educated class in the late 1960s, and that the educated class may ...
New books to read in June
Joseph's travails, told in a forceful stream of consciousness, expose the daily rhythms, obstacles and joys of one man's life. (Grand Central, June 18) 'Hombrecito,' by Santiago Jose Sanchez

HSTORY T2 Gr. 12 Black Consciousness Essay

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The Rise of Black Consciousness

SASO and Black Consciousness

The Broader Movement

Cultural Movement

Black Theology

Black Community Programs

The Black People’s Convention

Youth and Leadership

Clashes with the State

Post-1977 Black Consciousness Directions

Discussion of the Literature

Primary Sources

Public Archives

Digital and Filmed Collections

Links to Digital Materials

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The Early Years of the Black Consciousness Movement

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