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The Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa

The landscape of Black political activity in the 1960s was a very different one from that of the previous decade. The apartheid government had banished the Black resistance movements, in particular the African National Congress and Pan Africanist Congress. Those Black leaders who were not imprisoned by the state, fled into exile. A barrage of restrictive legislation effectively silenced Black opposition through bannings, arrests, and imprisonment of leaders. South Africa's economy grew and for White South Africans, life was good. For Black South Africans, the suffering continued.

Ironically the seeds of Black resistance in the 1960s could be found at the ‘bush campuses', like those at the University of the North and Zululand University. These institutions, created under the Extension of the University Education Act, Act 45 of 1959, became the breeding ground of Black resistance that was to become a force in the 1970s. Influenced by the American Black Power movement, the likes of Malcolm X, and closer to home by Frantz Fanon, Kenneth Kaunda, Julius Nyere and Kwame Nkrumah, a new framework of student thinking emerged. In South Africa, it was the late Anthony Lembede's Africanism that was a crucial influence in these universities.

Biko’s ideas became the major rallying point behind a pressure group that became well-known in South Africa as the BCM. From his 17th Birthday up to his death on 12 September 1977, Biko had an illustrious political career spanning about 14 years. He came into the political limelight in 1963, the year that witnessed a rise in the Poqo-led unrest in his home area. Stephen had just entered Lovedale College when his brother was arrested and jailed on suspicion of outlawed Poqo activity. He was interrogated by the police and subsequently expelled. This marked the beginning of Biko’s resentment against white authority. In 1964, he went to Marianhill in Natal (now KwaZulu Natal) and attended a private Roman Catholic school, Saint Francis College. Though Christian principles had meaning for him, Steve Biko, who was an articulate young man, resented (as indicated earlier) the idea of whites influencing the thinking of Africans about their future.

As an exponent of the Black Consciousness (BC) philosophy - together with other literate Africans residing in the major urban centres - he developed into a highly respected intellectual in the 1960s. Biko started searching for self-identity and hoped to build up the pride of Black culture - a culture that was scornfully viewed by the settler regime. Biko and his student colleagues had been receptive to the political ideas expressed by many Black intellectuals and they learned to use the sheer emotional power of the message of Black Consciousness with bitter assertiveness. As a result, these ideas and slogans filtered down to a much broader group of socially underprivileged people who were angry and impatient for meaningful action. This restructured consciousness emerged among students starting with those at Fort Hare and later spread to the Durban Medical School (Natal University). These constituted the new African petty bourgeoisie class.

The formation of SASO and the Black People's Convention

Black university students had tried for many years to make progress through the multiracial and liberal National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). In particular, NUSAS was outspoken in its criticism of government actions, especially at English-speaking universities where its membership was strong. Several young liberal white leaders of the organisation empathised with the Black cause and tried to protect politically active Black students from government counter-action by speaking out for them. However, Biko felt that even within anti-government politics Blacks took back seats to Whites. Dissatisfaction with the system was intense. In the period 1967-68 Steve Biko, now a medical student at Natal University, was one of the students who began to analyse and criticise the unhealthy political situation in the country. He instantaneously became the hero of millions of Africans who rejected apartheid.

At Wentworth, Natal University’s medical school for Blacks, Biko was elected to the Student’s Representative Council (SRC), and in 1967, attended a conference of students which was critical of the government. Primarily because NUSAS was dominated by whites, Rhodes University, the conference host, refused to allow mixed-race accommodation or eating facilities. Reacting angrily to the incident, Biko slated the incomplete integration of student politics under the existing system and dismissed talk of liberalism as an empty gesture by Whites who really wished to maintain the status quo and keep Blacks as second-rate citizens. The BCM that Biko founded rejected the notion that whites could play a role in the liberation of Blacks. “The main thing was to get black people to articulate their own struggle and reject the white liberal establishment from prescribing to people,” said Barney Pityana (Biko’s friend). Biko and his colleagues felt Blacks needed to learn to speak for themselves. In fact, as Pityana recalled, for white students, “NUSAS was a nice friendly club, another game you played while at university. Then you grew out of it,” but for Biko and other black students, NUSAS was not militant enough. Other liberal organisations like some churches were not open to blacks either. For Example, at a non-racial church conference, which Biko attended, white participants discouraged blacks from defying restrictions of the Group Areas Act, which limited Blacks to 72 hours in a white area. Being told how students should act annoyed Biko very much. It also underlined the extent to which Black South Africans were isolated even in the churches.

At the University Christian Movement (UCM) meeting held in Stutterheim in 1968, these usually reticent young people were enthusiastically supportive of Biko’s idea for an exclusively all-Black movement. In 1969 African students launched a Blacks-only student union, the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) to which Biko was elected president. The union was formed at a meeting at the University of the North near Pietersburg (now Polokwane), however the students of the University of Natal played the leading role in its formation. SASO made clear its common allegiance to the philosophy of Black Consciousness. In 1971, to encourage adult participation and promote their broad objectives, SASO leaders established an adult wing (umbrella organisation) of their organisation, the Black People’s Convention (BPC). Through these groups, Black Consciousness became part of the shared frame of reference.

In his new position, Biko was scathingly critical of white liberals who “could skillfully extract what [suited] them from the exclusive pool of white privileges.” He was also resentful of the fact that Blacks found themselves in a situation where the principles of liberty, equality, fraternity, rule of law and civil liberties were incidental to those that informed the struggle for fundamental freedoms in South Africa. The whole ideology of liberalism was seriously questioned and openly rejected by SASO with Biko as its main mouthpiece. With ever-growing radicalism, he explained why he was against integration when he said, “I am against the fact that a settler minority should impose an entire system of values on an indigenous people.”

South Africa’s mainly Black communities received these ideas with mixed feelings. Shocked White liberals, with their sincerity and deep convictions in question, felt they had become easy scapegoats for another racist organisation. The idea that Black people might determine their own destiny as well as develop a new Africanism with deep roots in the Black Consciousness Movement swept across Black campuses, strongly influencing those who had experienced the frustrations of the system of Bantu Education and those who detested feelings of inferiority to White people. In a short time, SASO became identified with Black Power and African humanism. This was reinforced by ideas emanating from Black America and Africa.

In particular, Biko preached that racial polarisation of society into hostile camps was a preliminary to race conflict and a strategy for change. He was convinced that, in order to prevent Blacks from sinking into apathetic acceptance of the system of separate development, continuous agitation had to take place to shake them up.

At the 1972 SASO conference, hostility towards Black leaders operating from officially approved institutions of apartheid emerged, resulting in the expulsion of the president of the adult wing of SASO (BPC), Themba Sono. Sono was expelled after giving a presidential address at the SASO annual conference calling for a pragmatic approach and careful collaboration with White liberals and for “Bantustan” leaders to advance the objectives of the organisation and the liberation struggle. Biko described Sono’s speech as “very dangerous”. In fact, Sono had Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, one time member of SASO, in mind when he pleaded for some sort of co-operation with selected leaders, saying he was a “force you cannot ignore.” Nevertheless, Biko could not be persuaded to ally with a leader that he perceived as representing the Black Face of Apartheid because of his (Buthelezi’s) acceptance of a leadership position in a 'white-made homeland'.

The main features of these SASO and BC were:

• That race was the source of continuing struggle in SA and for Black people this meant a reinterpretation of the meaning of blackness,
• The psychological liberation of the black man, in that the most potent tool in the hands of the oppressor are minds of the oppressed;
• The principle of non-violence. Moral superiority, as opposed to armed struggle would bring about change;
• A rejection of White liberalism as even the best intentioned white liberals could never understand the suffering of Blacks in South Africa;
• That the history of South Africa needed to be re-written in order for Black dignity to be restored;
• The influence of Black Theology as the Black man's faith must be retained in order to bolster his resistance to oppression.

As SASO and BC became politically assertive in their challenge to Apartheid ideology, government began to repress SASO and to condemn the BC ideology as a dangerous philosophy calling for the violent overthrow of the government. Government action against BC was exemplified in 1973 when it restricted Biko to the remote area of King William’s Town. It later put nine Black Consciousness leaders on trial, but when Biko testified on their behalf, the trial turned into a mere non-confrontational dialogue session on Black Consciousness philosophy.  

Related: feature on SASO

Next: The Black Face of Apartheid