Black Consciousness Movement vs. Apartheid in South Africa Essay

Introduction

31 years ago, in September 1977, Bantu Stephen Biko, a young ­ black activist, and a fighter against apartheid in South­ Africa have been killed in police torture chambers. Although he was only ­ one of many young black figures of resistance who have become victims of the special forces of the police in South Africa, he, undoubtedly, was one of the great prophets of his generation­. More than 20 000 people from all of the country have gathered to honor his memory at the funeral – having collected, thus, one of ­ the most mass demonstrations in South Africa in the seventies.

Outside of South Africa, the news about his death has stirred up a wave of criticism against the policy of apartheid. Biko called for consciousness awakening, considering ­ it as a means of resistance to oppression, against ­ reconciliation with existence within a system that was based on inequality. He has gone through the way from an activist of one of the student’s organizations, which united black and white­ students, to the leader and the ideologist of one of the largest ­ protest movements in South Africa which struggled and fought for blacks’ rights­. The short life – 30 years which has been taken away – Biko has devoted to the dethronement of apartheid’s defects, the system ­ of a social organization that brought sufferings to the black population of South Africa.

In his representation, the black ­ consciousness is a way to resist racism not only ­ by the rallying of the oppressed black majority, but also ­ by the realized formation of the fundamentally excellent system of social relations: “Black Consciousness is, in essence, the realization by the black man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the cause of their operation – the blackness of their skin – and to operate as a group in order to rid themselves of the shackles that bind them to perpetual servitude.” ¹

This essay despite its introduction is not about one man, it is about the movement that was influenced by a man and played a major role in the revival of resistance to apartheid in South Africa with the main idea that the ideology of Black Consciousness was the basis of African resistances towards white domination.

The System of Apartheid

The system of apartheid has its roots in the 350-year-old history of religious, land, and labor conflicts. In 1652 a group of Dutch immigrants has landed on the Cape of Good Hope and has gradually based a colony with rigid social division, living at the expense of the cultivation of the fertile earth by using the labor of slaves from Africa and Asia. In 1795 the control over territory was grasped by Great Britain, and Dutch-Afrikaners have moved in the depth of the continent and have based their new colonies. In 1899-1902 the British have suppressed a revolt in what is called the Second Boer War. “The war lasted three years and resulted mainly from a combination of personal ambition, conflict over a sea route to India, and most importantly, competition for control of the gold-mining developing in Witwatersrand.”²

After the declaration in 1910 of the Union of South Africa in which the former territories of British and the Boers have entered, the Afrikaners united under the power of the British monarch, who appeared in the majority had accepted the constitution in which basis laid the principle of the superiority of the white race. This was followed by the legislation that set the racial segregation by which almost all the land has been assigned to white owners, and the African, Asian, and “colored” population has been gradually superseded from the political life.

Following the declaration of the Union of South Africa, South African Native National Congress has been formed, and renamed in 1923 into the African National Congress, for racial discrimination counteraction, the fight for suffrage and equality while the shifting governments of the country steadily rejected its demands. Over half a century the rights of the black population were continuously denied through various acts that put further restrictions with each one released.

For example in 1913 an act called the Natives Land Act “prohibited African purchase or lease of land outside certain areas known as “reserves”³ The Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923 stated that “Africans were denied freehold property rights and were only allowed in South African cities “For so long as their presence is demanded by the wants of the white population.”⁴ After the power was captured in 1948 by the extremist Nationalist party which called itself the Gesuiwerde (purified) National Party formed by D.F. Malan, the system of apartheid became rooted in South Africa until 1994. The politics and policies of apartheid separated South Africa from the rest of the world through systematic and legal segregation upheld and defined by a small but powerful white bureaucracy. ⁵

The Movement

During the apartheid regime the culture, not only youth but also public, was frequently imposed from above, instead of being developed naturally on the basis of consciousness and historical continuity. The concept of consciousness imposed from above has been multiplied by the concept of an ethnic accessory which was defined by ideology and was supported by group interests. The policy that was born from the philosophy of the iridescent nation considers the many-sided nature and dynamism of various groups and does not accept the concepts of “natural”, static and invariable group or groups as it was treated by the apartheid’s regime.

This fact allowed the black population to start positioning themselves as the others in the cultural environment that was dominated by the white population. In South Africa, this tendency was shown in the creation of the organization under the name the “Black Consciousness Movement”. Helping black people in clearing the psychological inferiority complex which prevailed centuries over them in their political thinking and activity, and, especially, in their struggle against the domination of the white is mostly attributed to Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement.

The strategy of clearing of white domination and inequality, offered to the black population by Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement, was focused on the principle that carrying out any changes is possible only within the limits of the program developed by the black population. For this purpose, the black population should overcome the feeling of inferiority that was intentionally cultivated by the apartheid regime with the purpose of preserving the white domination in South Africa. “The racism we meet does not only exist on an individual basis; it is also institutionalized to make it look like the South African way of life”⁶

It was in this climate that Steve Biko founded the SASO as an alternate to the existing student organizations NUSAS that was not very effective recently. The white leaders of NUSAS (National Union of South African Students) acknowledged that they faced limitations in resisting apartheid and trying to represent blacks as equals⁷. Thus, the black consciousness movement began with the formation of the SASO.

The SASO Manifesto adopted in July 1971, declared that Black Consciousness was “an attitude of mind, a way of life, in which the black man saw himself as self-defined and not as defined by others”. It required “group cohesion and solidarity” so that blacks could become increasingly aware of their collective economic and political power⁸.

The Influence

Black Consciousness aimed at creating a social order dominated by a black way of life and thought, permeating a certain cultural blackness in all customs, tastes, values, religious and political principles, and all social relationships in their intellectual and moral connotation⁹. The black consciousness movement also brought to light the writings of African leaders that had been so far neglected, some of which included the works of Cheikh Anta Diop, Leopold Senghor on Negritude, Kenneth Kaunda on African humanism, and most importantly, Julius Nyerere on self-reliance and ujamaa or African socialism.

The evolving nature of the Black Consciousness Movement gave the struggle against apartheid a very dynamic front – by providing a conciliatory or revolutionary, a peaceful or violent, a bourgeois or socialist dimension to the confrontation between blacks and whites. By eschewing violence and emphasizing black cultural and psychological emancipation from white domination, the Black Consciousness Movement was initially the vehicle of a black philosophy of pride and self-affirmation invigorated by an ethic of “Christian Liberation”.

As the movement gradually came to recognize that it can be truly effective only if it addresses the real issues of class struggle and the fundamental role that the individual has in abolishing oppressive social structures, the Movement started focusing on the problem of the superstructure. As the most radical impact the black consciousness movement had on the resistance to Apartheid, the movement underlined that the black revolution which was made ineffective by the material structure can be rejuvenated only by the transformation of the black intellect. Thus, the revolution would occur only if the black mind stripped itself from submission to white hegemony and erected on its own foundations the principles of the new moral order.

While the intellectual elite stuck to the subtle points of BC ideology the common masses embraced the movement’s rhetoric in its emotional form, as a form of angry self-assertion¹⁰. Although the ideology was interpreted by angry youngsters as Black Consciousness and did not exactly resemble the set of complex ideas that had been elaborated by the movement’s leaders, the leaders felt that the expression of anger among the youth was a testimony to their success in inspiring blacks to assert themselves more openly¹¹.

However, this anger soon led to the uprising in 1976 at Soweto, in a way that despite being a direct outcome of the movement, it marked the beginning of a decline in its mass influence.

After the 1976 unrest, there was considerable debate as to the ideology of the Black Consciousness Movement and whether the white should be included in the struggle of the black population. Some Black Consciousness leaders continued to advocate excluding whites from the pre-liberation struggle, until 1977, when Biko himself advocated greater cooperation with supportive white organizations. He stated: “We don’t have sufficient groups who can form coalitions with blacks — that is groups of whites — at the present moment. The more such groups will come up, the better to minimize the conflict”.¹² With this statement, Biko moved towards the concept of closer cooperation between white and black groups, which would later be the foundation of the UDF.

Footnotes

1. Biko, I Write What I Like, p. 49.
2. Lindsay Michie Eades, The End of Apartheid in South Africa (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999) p. 6.
3. Lindsay Michie Eades, The End of Apartheid in South Africa (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999) p. 8.
4. Lindsay Michie Eades, The End of Apartheid in South Africa (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999) p. 8.
5. Lindsay Michie Eades, The End of Apartheid in South Africa (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999) p. 12.
6. Biko, I Write What I Like, p. 88.
7. Marx, Lessons of Struggle: South African Internal Opposition, 1960-1990. p. 52.
8. Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an Ideology. p. 270.
9. Fatton, Black Consciousness in South Africa: The Dialectics of Ideological Resistance to White Supremacy. p. 60.
10. Marx, Lessons of Struggle: South African Internal Opposition, 1960-1990. p.65.
11. Marx, Lessons of Struggle: South African Internal Opposition, 1960-1990. p. 65.
12. Biko, I Write What I Like, p. 151.