PART THREE
TWENTIETH-CENTURY FREEDOM STRUGGLES
Chapter Eight
Reform and Revolution in American and South African Freedom Struggles
Different though they may be in other ways, the histories of the United States and South Africa have been similar in one notable respect. To an extent unique in the modern world, these societies generated patterns of racial domination that culminated by the twentieth century in national or regional policies requiring the forced segregation of people designated as black or African. Consequently, historians and social scientists have compared these two racial orders with useful results.[1]
See George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York, 1981); Idem, The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery. Racism, and Social Inequality (Middletown, Conn., 1988), 216-269; John W. Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (Cambridge, U.K., 1982); and Stanley B. Greenberg, Race and State in Capitalist Development (New Haven, Conn., 1980).
But the work published in the 1980s on white supremacy in the two societies had one significant limitation: it focused almost exclusively on the thought and action of the oppressors. Left out of the comparison or treated in cursory fashion was the resistance of Africans and African Americans to white hegemony. In the introduction to my own book, White Supremacy, I acknowledged this limitation and called for work that would look at black-white relations in the two societies from the subaltern side of the color line.[2]Fredrickson, White Supremacy, xx.
Eventually I decided to take up my own challenge, and the full results have recently appeared in a book that offers a detailed treatment of a series of comparable phases of black ideological development over a period of about 150 years.[3]Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa (New York, 1995).
The research for that book obviously informs this essay, but here I explore a set of recurring themes that are embedded but not concisely articulated in the larger study.Like the book, this essay is based on the assumption that the organized and programmatic black opposition to white supremacy in the
United States and in South Africa can be compared in ways that will contribute to our understanding of both "freedom struggles." Despite the important differences in the background and circumstances of black people in the United States and South Africa, leaders of the resistance against racial oppression have embraced similar ideologies and engaged in comparable debates over ultimate objectives and strategies for achieving them. This discursive affinity derives for the most part from the analogous forms of racial oppression in both societies and has been nurtured to a significant extent by mutual awareness and cross-fertilization.
Similar ideological debates and divisions have arisen on two crucial issues. The first concerns future relations with whites. Is liberation to come through equal citizenship in a multiracial polity, or is the proper aim of the struggle the achievement of some form of independent nationhood? One answer draws on universalist standards of justice and human rights to reject a racially circumscribed political destiny; the other emphasizes racial or ethnic particularism and asserts that blacks cannot achieve self-realization by joining with whites in a unitary state. For convenience, I will label the two perspectives cosmopolitan and ethnocentric . The second dichotomy, which is not automatically resolved by adopting a cosmopolitan or an ethnocentric orientation, concerns the nature of the struggle: will it be carried on by reformist or revolutionary methods?
Cosmopolitans might believe that all people can be incorporated as equals into a common society through gradual elimination of the racist aspects of an otherwise acceptable political and social order. Or they might believe that racism is an integral part of the social and economic system and that the only way to eliminate it is to overthrow the system itself. Ethnic nationalists can also be reformist or revolutionary: they can either hope to gain their autonomy through peaceful negotiation or conclude that they must seize it by force of arms.
Using these dichotomies to analyze American and South African freedom struggles reveals some striking similarities. The most obvious is the predominance of cosmopolitan perspectives in the programs and ideologies of the most durable and historically influential black movements and associations. The principal American civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, has rarely wavered from the commitment to a racially integrated republic that it proclaimed at its founding in 1909. The more militant organizations that assaulted southern segregation in the late 1950s and
early 1960s—The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Committee on Racial Equality (CORE), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—all aimed, during this period at least, at removing the barriers to equal participation in a common society. Similarly, the African National Congress (ANC), founded in 1912, has consistently advocated a multiracial or nonracial South Africa, in which opportunity and citizenship would no longer depend on skin color and ancestry. Like the American civil rights organizations, it has normally welcomed white support and participation in the struggle against segregation. It has also avoided the strong temptation, obviously absent in the American case, to conceive of the future postapartheid nation as an exclusive expression of black or African ethnicity. As the Freedom Charter of 1955 proclaimed, "South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white."[4]
Thomas Karis and Gail M. Gerhart, Challenge and Violence, vol. 3 of From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa, ed. Thomas Karis and Gwendolen M. Carter (Stanford, Calif., 1977), 205.
These cosmopolitan or nonracial attitudes did not go unchallenged in either country. The most obvious characteristic of the oppressors was their pigmentation. Fraternity with conquerors or former slave-owners was hard for many black people to imagine, and it was often psychologically easier to hate whites and to wish to be rid of them than to distinguish between the sinners and their sins. The fact that black-white relations did not become the kind of zero-sum struggle-to-the-death between competing racial or ethnic groups that has developed in other parts of the world may seem miraculous given the flagrantly unjust treatment of blacks in the United States and South Africa. This achievement of mainstream black leaders was, and continues to be, a fragile one that has been under constant challenge from a variety of nationalist or separatist movements.
In the United States, a persistent undercurrent of separatist nationalism has ebbed and flowed since the early-to-mid nineteenth century, mainly in the form of African emigration movements. At times, this impulse has also taken the form of demands for territorial separation to establish the basis for a black nation within the existing boundaries of the United States. Major twentieth-century manifestations of the search for ethnic self-determination have included such notable mass movements as Marcus Garvey's Africa-oriented Universal Negro Improvement Association of the 1920s and the Nation of Islam—the so-called Black Muslims, who came to prominence in the 1950s and have retained substantial support up to the present day. For Garvey, the only way black Americans could liberate themselves from racism was to participate in the creation of an independent Africa. He saw no
long-term future for blacks in the United States because he viewed white racism as ineradicable. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Black Muslims, the Republic of New Africa, and other separatist groups called for the creation of a sovereign black nation within the current borders of the United States.[5]
See Fredrickson, Black Liberation, chaps. 2, 4, 7 for surveys of the history of black separatism in the United States and references to the principal secondary sources on this ideological tradition.
At the present time black nationalist sentiment appears to be reviving within an African American community that is suffering from an intensification of white hostility and discrimination. But, up to now, this feeling has expressed itself mainly in the form of cultural separation within the American educational system and has not produced a definite plan or program for political independence from a white-dominated America.In South Africa the ANC's multiracial or nonracial ideology has been continually challenged from within the organization as well as from outside by groups or movements usually designated as "Africanist." The Africanist perspective derives ultimately from the natural desire of conquered people to regain their land and was first articulated in the slogan "Africa for the Africans," which was associated with the rise of an independent black Christianity around the turn of the century. It was later expressed in a variety of messianic movements of the 1920s, some of them influenced by Garveyism, which heralded a racial apocalypse in which some supernatural power, or, alternatively, black American aviators flying bombing planes, would exterminate all of the whites or drive them into the sea.[6]
See ibid., chaps. 2 and 4; J. Mutero Chirinje, Ethiopianism and Afro-Americans in Southern Africa, 1883-1916 (Baton Rouge, 1987); Robert Edgar, "Garveyism in Africa: Dr. Wellington and the American Movement in the Transkei," Ufahumu 6 (1) (1976), 31-57.
A more secular and sophisticated version of Africanism emerged within the ANC during the period after World War II, partially in response to the Pan-Africanist ideology of independence movements elsewhere on the continent. The ANC Youth League of the mid-to-late 1940s, in which Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, and Walter Sisulu began their political careers, had a pronounced Africanist orientation in its early years. But in 1948 it explicitly repudiated the Garveyite slogan of "Africa for the Africans," indicating that African ascendancy would not mean exclusion or expulsion of whites from a liberated South Africa.[7]
Thomas Karis, Hope and Challenge, vol. 2 of From Protest to Challenge, ed. Karis and Carter (Stanford, 1973), 328.
After the ANC reaffirmed its multiracial vision of South Africa's future in the Freedom Charter of 1955, the minority that favored a nationalism based on consciousness of racial character and destiny seceded to form the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) in 1959. The Black Consciousness Movement of the 1970s retained some elements of the Pan-Africanist perspective, and in the 1990s the Africanist or ethnic nationalist strain of black liberationist thought survives in modified form (synthesized to some extent with Marxian class perspectives)in the PAC, the Azanian People's Organization, and allied groups.[8]
See Fredrickson, Black Liberation, chap. 7; Gail M. Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an Ideology (Berkeley, 1978); Robert M. Fatton, Black Consciousness in South Africa: The Dialectics of Ideological Resistance to White Supremacy (Albany, 1986); and N. Barney Pityana et al., The Bounds of Possibility: The Legacy of Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement (Cape Town, 1991).
Given their appeal to deep-seated popular emotions, it may seem remarkable that racially defined nationalisms have thus far failed to predominate in the politics of black protest and resistance in either country. This failure is especially remarkable in the case of South Africa. In the United States, the legacy of slavery, emancipation achieved with white allies, and the egalitarian amendments to the constitution passed during the Reconstruction era served to distance many black Americans from their African roots and raise enduring hopes for equality within a democratized republic. But some black South African nations lost their independence a little more than a century ago under conditions that permitted them to retain a sense of national or tribal identity. The continued if diminishing vitality of traditional African cultures and the intensification of white oppression and discrimination after 1910 might have been expected to undermine hopes for a common society based on racial equality and cooperation. One reason this did not happen is that universalist, cosmopolitan ideologies—especially Christian humanitarianism and Marxism—have exerted such a powerful influence on African elites.
During the early stages of twentieth-century black protest politics in both countries, the predominant ideology was a color-blind, cosmopolitan liberalism inherited from the nineteenth century. In the American context this was the tradition of Frederick Douglass and the interracial abolitionist and Radical Republican movements. In South Africa it was the legacy of "Cape liberalism"—the notion of "equal rights for every civilized man regardless of race or color" that had been proclaimed, often somewhat hypocritically, by white English-speaking "friends of the natives" in the Cape Colony in the decades just before the unification of South Africa in 1910. In the minds of many twentieth-century black leaders, most of whom were educated by white missionaries, this universalist liberalism was linked with Christianity and its ideal of human brotherhood. Normally, however, Christian liberalism is not a revolutionary creed. For the most part the ideologies that dominated black protest movements in South Africa until the 1950s and in the United States until the mid-1960s advocated incremental racial reformism rather than sudden and fundamental changes in the social and economic system.
The first serious efforts to redefine the black struggle in terms of a revolutionary cosmopolitanism came after the Russian Revolution
when Communists in both societies confronted the race issue and sought to mobilize blacks in the cause of proletarian revolution. The Communist campaign to overthrow capitalism in the United States and South Africa went through three similar stages. Initially the emphasis was on enrolling class-conscious white workers, even if this meant tactical concessions to their feelings of racial superiority and fears of economic competition with blacks willing to work for lower wages. (In 1922, the South African party, to support a strike against the displacement of white miners by lower-paid Africans, actually endorsed the slogan "Workers of the world unite for a white South Africa.") When a class appeal directed at whites failed to achieve mass support, Communists shifted some of their attention to blacks, basing their appeal on antiracism and calls for the solidarity of black and white workers. Finally, in 1928 the Comintern examined closely "the Negro question" in both the United States and South Africa and determined that a program based strictly on class would not be effective in attracting mass black support. Impressed by the popularity of the Garvey movement, the Comintern embraced the cause of black nationalism, calling for "a native republic" in South Africa and national self-determination for the Black Belt of the southern United States.[9]
See Fredrickson, Black Liberation, chap. 5, for a full discussion of these and subsequent efforts of Communists to put themselves in the forefront of black liberation struggles in the United States and South Africa. The notes for this chapter contain references to the major secondary sources on blacks and Communism in the two societies during the period between the mid twenties and the late forties.
This controversial redefinition did not involve accepting an essentialist view of race and cannot be attributed entirely to tactical cynicism. The new policy was rooted in the Leninist doctrine of attacking capitalism by encouraging national struggles against imperial domination, which required mobilization of the peasantry as a revolutionary force. In the late 1920s the majority of Africans and African Americans were still trapped in rural poverty and could plausibly be described as peasants whose subjugation and exploitation followed a color line and were rationalized in terms or race or ethnicity. Communists believed that these pre-proletarian victims of capitalism could most readily be aroused to insurrectionary action if the party promulgated a conception of liberation that appealed to their repressed desires for national or ethnic self-determination.
As a device for winning support among American blacks, the slogan had a very limited success. Robin Kelley has shown that a practical application of the slogan to the condition of southern sharecroppers, in the form of a demand that blacks be given ownership of the land they worked, had great resonance among a people who believed that they had once been promised some of the land that they had cultivated as slaves. The substantial if ephemeral success of the Communist-dominated
Alabama Sharecroppers Union was based in part on an interpretation of "Negro self-determination" that was congruent with the folk traditions of those being organized.[10]
See Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990).
But the slogan was applicable only to the rural South and thus could not serve as an effective means to coopt the ghetto nationalism expressed in the Garvey movement. In northern urban areas Communists persisted in their efforts to encourage interracial solidarity among industrial and commercial workers and in the early thirties withheld their support from the "don't buy where you can't work" campaigns of black activists because they considered them incompatible with a continued emphasis on interracial class solidarity. While occasionally giving lip service to the aim of "self-determination for the Black Belt," most American Communists in the 1930s concentrated on the economic or class issues brought to the fore by the Great Depression. The slogan virtually disappeared from Communist propaganda directed at African Americans after 1934 when a change in the international party line deemphasized anti-imperialist revolutions. Between 1934 and 1939 the highest priority of the Soviet Union was to encourage within Western democratic nations a united front of antifascist elements, which came to include not only white social democrats but also bourgeois "progressives."Communist appeals to nationalism in South Africa during the late twenties and thirties were also intermittent and of limited impact, despite their apparent compatibility with the situation of Africans as a colonized people. In the late 1920s, after having been expelled from the Industrial and Commercial Worker's Union (ICU)—an important independent association of black workers and peasants—Communists made their first serious effort to gain influence within the African National Congress. They succeeded in winning the cooperation of ANC president J. T. Gumede, who became sympathetic to Communism after a visit to the Soviet Union. But Gumede was ousted from the ANC leadership in 1930 by a conservative faction and the organization entered a nonmilitant accommodationist phase that lasted until the end of the decade. Torn by purges, factional conflict, and confusion about how to apply the "black republic" slogan, the South African Communist party also went into eclipse and did not revive until the Second World War. Free from significant left-wing influence, the mainstream black organizations—the ANC and the All-African Convention of the mid thirties—limited themselves to protesting against new legislative assaults on African rights, hoping in vain to reverse the tide of racial segregation and discrimination through peaceful and legal forms of protest.
The perspective of the American Communist party and of others who took a Marxist or socialist view of the racial question reached its high point of influence among African Americans in the mid-to-late 1930s. Helped by the economic desperation of blacks and whites alike during the Great Depression, hopes of cooperation between black and white workers revived among leftists and also influenced a broad spectrum of black leaders and intellectuals. But the party's favorable image in the black community stemmed primarily from its endorsement of traditional civil rights objectives and its essentially reformist stance during the Popular Front era. Instead of trying to convert large numbers of blacks to a revolutionary ideology, Communists curried favor by accommodating themselves in the short run to the dominant tradition of cosmopolitan reformism.
World War II and the Cold War brought a striking reversal of the situation of the radical left in both countries. In the United States, Marxists lost influence among blacks, and Communists were relegated to the periphery of an intensifying black civil rights struggle. In South Africa, Communists became major participants in the struggle for black liberation, forging a working alliance with the African National Congress that has proved remarkably durable. In the period between 1940 and 1960 reformism became more dominant than ever in the American movement; simultaneously an overtly revolutionary ideology was becoming increasingly influential in the South African struggle.
The decline of radical, potentially revolutionary, influences on American racial movements stemmed in part from Communist blunders and miscalculations during the war years, which made the party seem less militant and committed to black equality than thoroughly reformist groups like the NAACP and the March on Washington movement (at least until 1944 when the Soviet Union was no longer in danger, and it again became acceptable in party circles to agitate militantly against Jim Crow). After the war, the McCarthyite hysteria affected mainstream black movements and induced them to keep Communists at arm's length. At the same time, reformism was beginning to pay off in favorable court decisions against the segregation and disfranchisement of southern blacks and in growing black influence on the national Democratic party. Once the repressive McCarthyite phase of the late 1940s and early 1950s had run its course, the Cold War actually encouraged gains in civil rights because policymaking elites became aware that America's practice of racial discrimination impeded the propaganda
struggle for the "hearts and minds" of people of color in Africa and Asia.
In South Africa the triumph of the Nationalist party in 1948 led to the extension and intensification of racial segregation under the banner of apartheid; consequently the futility of reformism became increasingly evident. In 1949 a younger generation, influenced by Africanism as well as Marxism, came to power in the ANC and launched a campaign of militant nonviolent resistance against the apartheid regime. The example of independence movements elsewhere in Africa encouraged aspirations for a nationalist revolution in South Africa. In the 1950s the ethnocentric or Africanist impulse was marginalized, partly as a result of Communist influence. The basis for cooperation between the ANC and the CP was set forth by Moses Kotane, a black Communist who was also an ANC leader. According to this doctrine, the South African revolution would be a two-stage affair, first a struggle for national self-determination to achieve democratic majority rule, and then a freely chosen transformation to socialism. Even if the majority of the ANC did not endorse the second revolution or was uncertain about it, there was no justification for refusing Communist assistance in achieving the primary objective, especially since the ANC's great tradition was cooperation with sympathetic whites, and most of the whites who fully endorsed racial equality and "one person, one vote" in South Africa during the immediate postwar period were Communists or fellow-traveling radicals. Making common cause with Communists made sense to staunch opponents of the South African regime at a time when the Soviet Union, unlike the United States, was strongly supportive of the struggle against apartheid. When nonviolent acts of civil disobedience were shown to be suicidal at Sharpeville in 1960 and both the ANC and PAC were forced underground, the National Congress's reluctant acceptance of violent resistance took the form of establishing, jointly with the Communist party, a military organization committed to sabotage and ultimately to guerrilla warfare. The turn to revolutionary cosmopolitanism seemed irrevocable. The ANC's slogan of the 1980s—Apartheid cannot be reformed"—was taken to mean that it must be overthrown.[11]
See Fredrickson, Black Liberation, chap. 6. The fullest account of black political thought and action during the postwar era is Tom Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa since 1945 (London, 1983).
As American and South African freedom struggles diverged, it began to seem more and more obvious that the situations in the two countries were radically different. A black majority can hope to make a revolution by itself, but a black minority can scarcely expect to do so. Furthermore the United States Constitution encouraged hopes for equal
citizenship, whereas South Africa's constitutional and legal framework was unequivocally white supremacist and would have to be completely reconstituted if blacks were to have any semblance of equal rights. But what has occurred in black thinking and consciousness since the 1960s shows that revolutionary attitudes could reemerge in the American context and that reformist tactics could again seem relevant or necessary in the South African.
The more militant and confrontational American civil rights movement of the early 1960s was often described at the time as a "nonviolent revolution" or as "the Negro revolution." In a special sense, the term is entirely appropriate. The movement used disruptive and coercive methods—sit-ins, boycotts, mass marches, and demonstrations—that violated state and local laws and went beyond normal American limits on peaceful dissent and reformist agitation. If these methods were nonviolent, they were likely to provoke violence and were to some extent intended to do so; although, as Adam Fairclough has shown, careful planning helped to minimize the bloodshed.[12]
Adam Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr., (Athens, Ga., 1987), 7-8 and passim.
Furthermore, civil rights activists rejected gradualism, insisting on "Freedom, Now." Within the context of a southern social order based on legalized racism, the movement was indeed revolutionary in its intentions and achievements.Within a national context, however, its reformist characteristics were apparent. Supreme Court decisions reinterpreting constitutional provisions for equal rights gave the movement legitimacy and put the onus of law-breaking on the southern segregationists. In 1964 and 1965 the U. S. Congress enacted most of the program of southern protesters, reflecting a decision of national elites to remove the embarrassing anomaly of legalized segregation and denial of voting rights in one section of the country. In bringing southern racial practices into harmony with the rest of the country, national legislators and policymakers were promoting the health and safety of the American social and economic system as a whole. The civil rights legislation can therefore be viewed as the culmination of a successful reform movement, one that strengthened and legitimized fundamental social and economic arrangements rather than calling them into question and inciting radical resistance to the status quo.
Nevertheless, the legislative success of the civil rights movement failed to pacify African Americans; indeed its aftermath was the most devastating and bloody wave of urban disorders in American history—the ghetto insurrections of 1965–1968. The failure of civil rights reform
to address the economic disadvantages under which most blacks labored and its inability to meet the rising expectations of a better life that the movement's rhetoric had called forth, encouraged a bitter and rebellious mood in the black urban communities of the North and West. The result was the upsurge of revolutionary rhetoric associated with the slogan "Black Power." But the rhetoric did not easily crystallize into effective political ideology, because it was hard to imagine how a black revolution could actually take place within a nation that was mostly white. The most plausible formulation was probably that of the Black Panther party, which eventually went beyond a strictly black nationalist viewpoint and envisioned an American dispossessed class, composed mainly but not exclusively of dark-skinned victims of racism, acting in support of the struggle of third-world peoples against Western imperialism.[13]
For a full discussion of the evolution of Black Power ideology, see Fredrickson, Black Liberation, chap. 7, and John T. McCartney, Black Power Ideologies: An Essay in African-American Political Thought (Philadelphia, 1992).
By itself the Black Power slogan had limited revolutionary potential, despite its capacity to stimulate localized disorders, because it so readily lent itself to essentially reformist purposes. It normally meant rejection of nonviolent tactics but only to the extent that self-defense was sanctioned. Its call for racial mobilization could, and often did, mean merely the organization of black voters into an ethnic bloc and the encouragement of black capitalist enterprise. As Stokely Carmichael and others explicitly proclaimed, Black Power was in the American tradition of ethnic mobilization for political and economic advantage, as pioneered by the Irish, the Jews, and other white ethnic minorities.[14]
See Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York, 1967), 44-56.
From this perspective Black Power was not so much a radical and revolutionary separatism as a tough-minded and somewhat cynical program for group incorporation into a society that was conceived as culturally pluralist rather than homogeneous and as more responsive to physical power than to assertions of democratic values. In its most common applications Black Power turned out to be an ethnocentric reformism, which departed from the cosmopolitan reformism of the civil rights movement in its stress on racial identity and integrity rather than in its social and economic radicalism. In fact Martin Luther King, Jr., during the last years of his life, was more consistently radical on social and economic questions than many Black Power advocates.[15]On King's embrace of social radicalism, see especially David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York, 1986), 527-624.
The South African Black Consciousness Movement of the 1970s borrowed some of its rhetoric from the American Black Power movement. There was a similar emphasis on psychological and organizational independence from liberal or even radical whites. But, as Steve Biko made clear in an explicit comparison of the two movements, there
was a great difference between a minority movement aimed at incorporation on its own terms and a majority movement seeking to gain control of its own country.[16]
Steve Biko, Black Consciousness in South Africa, ed. Arnold Mallard (New York, 1978), 98.
Although repression prevented the Black Consciousness Movement from openly avowing its revolutionary aims (at times it explicitly denied them), it was clear to everyone who thought much about it, including the South African government, that BC could not achieve its aims except by a nationalist revolution. By broadening the conception of "black" to include Indians and "Coloreds," it transcended the Africanist tradition, but its rejection of whites put it in obvious conflict with the ANC's nonracial cosmopolitanism.[17]See Gerhart, Black Power, 257-299.
After the Soweto uprising of 1976, which was inspired in part by the Black Consciousness Movement, some commentators predicted that the ANC's nonracialism would soon cease to dominate the antiapartheid movement and that a racially defined nationalism would come to the fore in the black struggle. But during the 1980s the mainstream domestic movement, represented principally by the United Democratic Front (UDF), proclaimed its allegiance to the cosmopolitan Freedom Charter and opened its ranks to white supporters, thus relegating groups with an exclusivist Black Consciousness orientation, like the Azanian People's Organization, to the periphery of the struggle. Now linked to a vigorous internal movement, the ANC gained in international prestige and recognition, utterly eclipsing the PAC, the other exile organization. In the mid-eighties the increasing level of violent and nonviolent resistance to the regime and the government's desperate and draconian efforts to repress the antiapartheid movement made it seem more likely than ever that South Africa was in a classic revolutionary situation. However long it might take, it seemed inevitable that white tyranny would be overthrown; it also seemed clear that it would have to be overthrown by revolutionary action, because the government gave no signs of a willingness to negotiate a peaceful transfer of power to the black majority.[18]
A good account of South African developments in the 1980s is contained in Anthony Marx, Lessons of Struggle: South African Internal Opposition to Apartheid, 1960-1990 (New York, 1992).
The surprising turn of events in 1989–1990—the emergence of nonviolent mass resistance against segregation laws for the first time since 1960; the unprecedented success of this movement in gaining the right to protest and in pressuring the government to phase out petty apartheid; the dramatic release of Nelson Mandela; the beginning of discussions between the government and the ANC; and the subsequent negotiations that have led to a new constitution, democratic elections, and the presidency of Nelson Mandela—have called into question the
conventional wisdom on the inevitability of a South African revolution. Many observers of the late 1980s had described the situation as a stalemate or impasse—the African resistance lacked the power to overthrow the regime, but the government lacked the ability to suppress the level of black opposition to a point where it could feel secure. Furthermore, the economy, seriously damaged by international sanctions that were intensified by the domestic upheaval and repression of the 1980s, was in such bad shape that it threatened to undermine white expectations of prosperity under apartheid.[19]
For a discussion of the expert opinion of the late 1980s, see George M. Fredrickson, "Can South Africa Change?," New York Review of Books, 26 October 1989, 48-56.
What these observers had for the most part failed to anticipate was that this impasse would prove so unsatisfactory for both sides that they would jointly seek a negotiated settlement rather than risk a long, uncertain, and debilitating struggle for the unconditional surrender of their opponents. In opting for negotiations, the ANC realized that it could not achieve all its objectives in the near future. The white minority did not surrender unconditionally, because it had no necessity or incentive to do so. Hence it is not surprising that the ANC accepted some compromises, agreeing to an interim arrangement that fell short of achieving its professed goal of untrammeled black majority rule in a unitary state. Mandela and the leadership of the ANC concluded that a compromise constitutional settlement, involving some checks and balances to protect the white minority's economic and social privileges, would open the way to the eventual achievement of a substantive form of black majority rule. But the entrenchment of market capitalism and the recognition of most existing white property rights was the price that had to be paid to open up the political system to Africans by some means short of actually driving the whites from power after a prolonged and bloody revolutionary struggle.
Major reform, with revolutionary implications for the racial status order but not for the character of other social and economic relationships, is one way to describe what has taken place in South Africa during the last seven years. As in the American South, however, that reform was forced from below by militant confrontational tactics rather than imposed from above in an effort to head off trouble that had not yet reached crisis proportions. In such cases the maintenance of a sharp dichotomy between reform and revolution becomes problematic. Clearly the analogy with what happened in the United States during the 1960s is not so far-fetched as many, including myself, thought it would be in the 1980s. In both countries, it now appears, the cause of black liberation has entered a new phase. The current challenge is
how to go beyond an effective mobilization against legalized segregation and denial of voting rights to mount a successful political challenge to the de facto inequality of white and black circumstances in the two societies—a gap that in the United States, by some measures, is actually increasing. A new synthesis of reformist and revolutionary methods or perspectives will be required to move the two freedom struggles to a higher stage.
Chapter Nine
Prophets of Black Liberation
Close comparisons of the "freedom struggles" of African Americans and black South Africans are difficult to make because of the great differences in the situation and the prospects of people of color in the two societies. One fundamental difference was brought home to me in the spring of 1989 when I visited the Reverend Allan Boesak, then a leading figure in the domestic resistance to apartheid, in his office in a "Colored" suburb of Cape Town. In both his inner and his outer offices, Boesak had hung large portraits of Martin Luther King, Jr. I knew also that he had written a dissertation in theology at the University of Leiden on the ethics of Dr. King and Malcolm X.[1]
This dissertation has been published in David J. Garrow, ed., Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, vol. 1 (Brooklyn, 1989), 58-126.
But when I asked him to reflect on the relationship between the black American movements of the 1960s and his own antiapartheid campaign, he argued that there was a big difference between a minority's battle for equality in a predominantly white society and a black majority's effort to overthrow the rule of a white minority. The distinction that he made between an essentially reformist civil rights movement and a revolutionary effort to empower a disenfranchised majority seemed totally persuasive.But the unexpected events of the past several years have blurred this distinction. By deciding to give up the armed struggle and negotiate with the de Klerk government, the African National Congress did not abandon its goal of winning power for the black majority, but the methods it had to use to achieve this end may bear comparison with those used by African Americans to dismantle legalized segregation in
the 1960s. In the period immediately after its legalization, the ANC did not have much success in mobilizing the masses for nonviolent action to put pressure on the government for a new constitution based on one-person, one-vote; it was preoccupied with violent challenges to its claim to speak for blacks, especially from the Zulu-based Inkatha movement. But in its later efforts to build an effective and disciplined popular movement—one that could give muscle to the negotiating position of its leaders by calling for consumer boycotts, general strikes, and mass demonstrations—it may have found that the southern civil rights movement offered some useful tactical lessons.
Despite the obvious differences in racial demography (and the subtler differences between a population descended from slaves who were transported by force from one continent to another, and one deriving mainly from conquered peoples, who were dominated and oppressed but left with some shreds of autonomy and dignity), black South African leaders and intellectuals have often in the past looked to African American movements and ideologies for inspiration and guidance. Odd as it may seem now, some of the men who founded the African National Congress (originally called the South African Native National Congress) in 1912 were under the spell of Booker T. Washington and his doctrine of black self-help and accommodation to white authority. In his acceptance speech, the first president of the Congress called Washington his "guiding star," because he was "the most famous and the best living example of our Africa's sons."[2]
Peter Walshe, The Rise of African Nationalism in South Africa: The African National Congress, 1912-1952 (Berkeley, 1971), 13.
Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican black nationalist who based his "Africa for the Africans" movement in Harlem and attracted widespread African American support just after World War I, also had a vogue in South Africa. Besides gaining the admiration of some members of the African elite, he inspired messianic popular movements fed by a prophecy that he would appear at the head of a black American army to overthrow white rule.[3]See Robert A. Hill and Gregory Pirio, "'Africa for the Africans': The Garvey Movement in South Africa," in The Politics of Race and Class in Twentieth-Century South Africa, ed. Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido (London, 1987), 209-253.
In the 1940s, the ANC was led by an American-educated physician who drew inspiration from the civil rights activities of the NAACP. Dr. A. B. Xuma, president of the ANC from 1940 to 1949, had studied in the United States for thirteen years. (At the University of Minnesota he met Roy Wilkins, the future head of the NAACP, who was to be a lifelong friend.) At the time he headed the ANC, Xuma had an African American wife and remained in close touch with American developments.[4]
These connections are revealed in the Xuma papers at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, theBlack Power movement in the United States provided most of the rhetoric and some of the ideas for the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa.[5]
See Gail M. Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an Ideology (Berkeley, 1978), 273-281.
Julie Frederikse's documentary history of ideological currents in the antiapartheid struggle, The Unbreakable Thread , provides new evidence of how the thinking of young Africans in the early 1970s could be revolutionized from reading Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and Eldridge Cleaver.[6]Julie Frederikse, The Unbreakable Thread: Non-Racialism in South Africa (Bloomington, Ind., 1990).
But there is a conspicuous and revealing gap in the history of African American influence and example in South Africa. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the nonviolent direct action for equal rights that he represented had relatively little meaning for the antiapartheid resistance in South Africa. There is nothing mysterious about this. In 1952, three years before the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the African National Congress, under a new leadership, including Nelson Mandela, that was more militant and confrontational than the elite that previously ran it, had embarked on a campaign of nonviolent resistance. Ruthless repression, culminating in the massacre at Sharpeville in 1960, convinced the African nationalist leadership that nonviolence would not work in the face of an implacable and unscrupulous racist regime, and that force, initially limited to sabotage but later including guerrilla warfare, would have to be employed.
Thus, at about the time that King was achieving international recognition as an advocate and practitioner of nonviolent direct action, the South African struggle had taken a turn that tended to make his philosophy outdated and irrelevant. In James H. Cone's comparative biography of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, Martin & Malcolm & America , we discover that in a 1964 radio talk in Britain Malcolm X used Nelson Mandela's conversion to violence as a reason for describing King's nonviolent philosophy as "bankrupt." Cone also notes that King was always more popular in Europe than in the third world: "His philosophy of nonviolence was ignored in many Third World countries as their Colored inhabitants took up arms against European colonizers."[7]
James H. Cone, Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare (Maryknoll, N.Y., 1991), 209, 258.
What happened in the African National Congress between the 1940s and the 1960s—or between the age of Xuma and that of Mandela—was that the struggle was redefined. An earlier, more moderate ANC leadership had viewed their cause as one of gradual reform to achieve equal rights, a clear counterpart to the NAACP's program for the United States; a new and more militant leadership, emerging from the
ANC Youth League of the 1940s, moved from nonviolent confrontation to armed struggle, with an increasing conviction that their model was anticolonialist revolution rather than an American-style civil rights movement. Only when revolutionary, anti-imperialist rhetoric began to come from black Americans in the late 1960s did African American thought again strike a chord with a substantial number of black South African activists.
If one looks for the recurring themes in the history of dialogue and cross-fertilization between African Americans and black South African thought about equality or liberation, it becomes evident that blacks in the two societies have shared a common problem that did not have to be faced by most anticolonial revolutionaries. In simplest terms, it was the question of what to do about the whites. Although only a minority in South Africa (currently about 15 percent of the total population), Europeans have been there for almost as long as those in the United States and seem likely to stay. Occasionally there has been talk of pushing the white man into the sea, but prominent black leaders of all ideological persuasions have tended to accept the white presence as an unalterable fact of life.
In the United States, an extreme version of black nationalism has emerged from time to time to call for a total separation of the races through black emigration or by ceding blacks a part of the United States, but most black thinkers and political leaders have assumed that African Americans would continue to live with whites in a common society and under a single government. The difficult question, applicable to both situations, is whether blacks should go it alone in their struggle against white supremacy or whether they should cooperate with those whites who profess a commitment to racial justice. The nationalist position is that blacks have to fight their own battles. White allies will be unreliable because few will be able to overcome completely their culture's assumption of white superiority, and undesirable because their presence in a black liberation movement will endanger the racial solidarity and spirit of self-determination deemed essential to group pride and mobilization. (Malcolm X's verdict on the white liberal was that "when the chips are down, you'll find that as fixed in him as his bone structure is his sometimes unconscious conviction that he's better than anybody black.")[8]
The Autobiography of Malcolm X, with the assistance of Alex Haley (New York, 1965), 27.
Interracialists, or (to use the South African terminology) "nonracialists," welcome the involvement of some antiracist whites because the cause is defined as a crusade to transcend race in the name of color-blind
conception of democracy. The actual history of a debate over relations with whites is not, however, as neat and simple as this abstract dichotomy would suggest. In practice, the lines between interracialism and separatist nationalism could blur in response to the opportunities or exigencies of the moment. For example, it was sometimes argued that blacks needed to go it alone in the short term in order to develop the strength and self-confidence to interact and make common cause with sympathetic whites at some time in the future—when they could do so on the basis of feeling equal. Because of similarities in the ways such issues were formulated and resolved, there are some instructive analogies between the "separate or together" debate of the 1960s in the United States and the South African debate that began in the 1950s and continues today between "nonracialists" and advocates of "Africanism" or "Black Consciousness."
James H. Cone's Martin & Malcolm & America is an illuminating discussion of how the issue of integration vs. separatism was played out in the thought of the two most influential black leaders of the 1960s. Although unknown to most whites, Cone himself is a major figure in recent black intellectual history. A professor for many years at Union Theological Seminary, he is usually regarded as the father of "black theology"—the synthesis of Christian belief and Black Power ideology that emerged out of the ferment of the late 1960s.[9]
See Cone's Black Theology and Black Power (New York, 1969), and A Black Theology of Liberation (Philadelphia, 1970).
Because he went beyond narrow ethnocentrism and made the plight of blacks in the United States a symbol of the oppression of the poor throughout the world, arguing that Christ's message for the modern age was social revolution, he influenced the founders of Latin American liberation theology (which may explain why Martin & Malcolm was published by the Maryknoll fathers). He also helped to inspire the development of a Black Theology in South Africa and has engaged in a serious, ongoing dialogue with black South African churchmen opposed to apartheid.[10]See Dwight N. Hopkins, Black Theology, U.S.A. and South Africa (Maryknoll, N.Y.), 1989.
Much of Cone's original inspiration came from Malcolm X, and his early work might be seen as an effort to give a Christian justification to Malcolm's black nationalism. One might therefore expect that his book comparing "Martin and Malcolm" would be a brief for the latter and a rejection of the former. But in fact he tries to show that both were authentic representatives of black America and that their views were not as irreconcilable as is generally supposed. He begins by putting each leader in a particular sociological setting. King embodied the potential for liberation of the southern black middle class. Steeped in the
Christian universalism of the southern black church; the self-help, character-building philosophy of Booker T. Washington; and the progressive civil rights activism of the NAACP; King was in a good position to lead a nonviolent campaign against legalized segregation. But in giving voice to the aspirations of southern and middle-class blacks, he failed to address the problems and concerns of lower- or working-class blacks, especially in the northern urban ghettos.
As King himself came to recognize, the desperate and deteriorating economic and social conditions of the ghetto poor could not be remedied by civil rights laws aimed at the southern Jim Crow system. Furthermore, the values to which he appealed on behalf of nonviolence and integration had little meaning to those trapped in the ghetto by structural or institutional forms of racism that made integration seem like a pipe dream. For many blacks whose principal contacts with whites came in the form of police harassment and brutality, a doctrine of integration through nonviolent protest seemed more like a device to pacify blacks and salve the consciences of white liberals than a program for black liberation.
According to Cone, Malcolm X gave voice to the genuine feelings and aspirations of the mass of northern urban blacks. By calling on them to value their blackness and separate themselves voluntarily from whites, he provided the only basis for pride and positive identity that was in fact available to them. By sanctioning violence, at least for the purposes of self-defense, he endorsed attitudes toward whites that were more natural and appropriate to the circumstances of most blacks than King's seemingly impossible demand that blacks turn the other cheek and love their oppressors. When Malcolm rejected America and told blacks that they had no stake in what he considered an irremediably white-supremacist society, he reflected the reality of ghetto life as many blacks felt and perceived it.
It is hard to accept Cone's view that Malcolm's "vituperative language against whites did not mean that he hated whites or that he was trying to make blacks hate them."[11]
Cone, Martin & Malcom, 108.
During his period as a minister for the Nation of Islam, and before he broke with Elijah Muhammed, was he not in effect arguing that whites deserved to be hated? But he had tapped a deep vein of justifiable anger and resentment within the black community. To say that racism breeds counterracism does not deny the importance of Malcolm X. In exposing whites to the real feelings of many blacks, he revealed the dimensions of the Americanracial problem to an extent that the King of the early 1960s was unable to do.
Cone's contrast of King's position before 1965 and Malcolm's before he broke with the Black Muslims in 1964 contains few surprises for anyone who has a keen memory of the events of the period—although it is useful to have such a vivid reminder of the fierce debates of the time. More original and potentially more controversial is Cone's contention that both men changed their views late in their tragically abbreviated lives in ways that substantially narrowed the gap between them and removed the necessity to choose between their philosophies. After breaking with Elijah Muhammed and becoming an orthodox Muslim, Malcolm X emphatically repudiated his cosmic racialism and admitted into his thinking a conception of human brotherhood. He even conceded that not all white Americans were "devils" and that some whites might contribute positively to the cause of African American liberation—not however by joining black organizations, such as Malcolm's own Organization for Afro-American Unity, but rather by working to combat racism within their own communities.
Malcolm remained a separatist and black nationalist, and his new nonsectarian version of black self-determination was perhaps the main intellectual source for the Black Power movement that arose after his death in 1965. But his categorical antipathy to whites—which has to be considered racist—was abandoned, along with his assumption that blacks had no conceivable place in America. He now seemed to entertain the hope, if not the expectation, that a unified black community might be able to transform America itself into some kind of democratic plural society in which blacks could feel at home without having to reject their identity as people with African roots and a distinctive culture.
Malcolm's movement toward a qualified, pluralistic form of interracialism is well known to hundreds of thousands of readers of his autobiography. Less well recognized is King's acknowledgment toward the end of his life that not all forms of black separatism and self-segregation were bad. The disillusionment with America that set in after the Watts riot of 1965, the failure of his Chicago open housing campaign, and the nation's deepening commitment to what he came to regard as an imperialist war in Vietnam did not make King repudiate his dream of an integrated America, but it did force a reassessment of how hard it would be to get there.
The plight of black America, he began to realize, was inseparable from the inequities of a capitalist society; true equality would require more than the abolition of legalized segregation and the protection of black voting rights. Along with his well-documented turn toward democratic socialism went a certain disenchantment with the mainstream white liberals who had backed the Civil Rights Act but had no stomach for the elimination of poverty through the redistribution of wealth.[12]
The radicalization of King's social thought is demonstrated in David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York, 1986).
Cone shows that King also softened his opposition to black separatism. In 1967 and 1968 he acknowledged the need for "temporary segregation" in cases where desegregation was not, for the time being, a practical possibility (as in the inner cities), or where integration meant a loss of group power. "There may be periods," he told a Miami audience in February 1968, "where segregation may be a temporary way-station to an integrated society," and expressed the fear that in cases of desegregation in which the dissolution of black-run institutions or associations was involved, blacks might be "integrated out of power."[13]
Cone, Martin & Malcolm, 213-214, 226, 234-235.
In the last analysis, despite Cone's efforts, King does not make a very convincing black nationalist and it is hard to believe that he and Malcolm would ever have fully agreed on the separate-or-together issue even if both had lived to a ripe old age. On one question, as Cone readily concedes, they remained in deep disagreement—the choice of violence or nonviolence as the path to black liberation in the United States. And here, somewhat surprisingly, in view of his endorsement of black violence in his early expositions of black theology, Cone comes down on the side of King. He also proclaims that King's vision of a "beloved community" united across racial lines by Christian love remains "the ultimate goal" of the black freedom movement:
As important as black nationalism is for the African-American struggle, it cannot be the ultimate goal. The beloved community must remain the primary objective for which we are striving. On this point Martin was right: "for better or worse we are all on this particular land together at the same time, and we have to work it out together."[14]
Ibid., 294.
Cone concludes by invoking the contemporary image of America as a multicultural "rainbow" composed of diverse "members of one human family," in which no group claims genetic or cultural superiority over the others. From his perspective of the 1990s, Cone argues that the achievement of King's beloved community requires not only elimination of the racism that he and Malcolm understood and fought so
courageously, but also the "classism" that they more dimly perceived, and the "sexism" that they completely failed to recognize and struggle against.
Cone's attempt to synthesize the ideas of King and Malcolm and update their insights to conform with more recent trends in "liberationist" thought is a major contribution to the discussion of race and ethnicity in modern America. But one unresolved tension in his thinking exposes the philosophical problem at the root of current debates about cultural pluralism. At one point, Cone seems to be criticizing King for his "universalism" and praising Malcolm for his ethnic particularism:
Martin's faith was universal; that is, it was meant to embrace everybody , which meant, in the modern world of Euro-America, that it was ultimately defined by white people and those who shared their values. Martin had to reinterpret a white religion, designed to enslave blacks, into a religion of black liberation. Malcolm, however, contended that black people "need a religious expression that is not dictated and controlled by their enemies," but rather by themselves.[15]
Ibid., 15.
Cone praises Malcolm X for rejecting Black Muslim ideas and turning to orthodox Islam, because this allowed him to "move toward a universal perspective on humanity that was centered on his commitment to the black liberation struggle in America."[16]
Ibid., 211.
Cone seems to assume that a universalism derived from the European tradition is fatally contaminated by racism, whereas one that is based on a non-Western source such as Islam is justified because of its putative link to the struggle against white or Western domination.Beyond the obvious question of how Cone justifies his own adherence to Christianity, there is the more serious issue of the complex relationship of "Western values" to the liberation struggles of people of non-Western origins. Although racism, broadly defined, may not be uniquely Western, the rationalized, pseudoscientific form of racism that served to justify a worldwide system of domination and exploitation undoubtedly is. But antiracism and the ideal of universal human rights are at least in their characteristic modern formulations also products of Western civilization. Those non-Western struggles for freedom or self-determination that have proclaimed some form of democracy as their objective have appealed to conceptions of human rights first abstractly set forth by eighteenth-century European or American thinkers and revolutionaries; and they were given new social and economic content by
nineteenth-century European socialists. It is no more accurate to say that Western thought is inherently racist than to say that is inherently antiracist. It can be either, depending on how it is interpreted and on what is regarded as essential and what is seen as the betrayal of its essence.
King's creative appropriation of Christian altruism and the Social Gospel was a powerful and persuasive argument for black liberation from Jim Crow, just as Fredrick Douglass's appropriation of Enlightenment conceptions of natural rights furthered the cause of abolitionism in the nineteenth century. Wholesale rejection of Western values, as opposed to the appropriation of those that seem truly universal in their capacity to liberate and humanize "everybody," seems to me self-denying and possibly self-defeating. It is difficult to see what else can serve as the basis for the egalitarian rainbow society that Cone proclaims as his ultimate goal.
Julie Frederikse's The Unbreakable Thread: Non-Racialism in South Africa demonstrates that the South African antiapartheid movement has rejected racial separatism, even as a temporary phase of the struggle, and has embraced a color-blind universalism without worrying about its cultural antecedents. Frederikse, who has been a correspondent for National Public Radio in South Africa, uses oral history interviews and documents to demonstrate that the black nationalist or Afrocentric conceptions of the cause have had a hearing but have remained a minority viewpoint and that the main currents of the movement have remained resolutely "nonracialist" in outlook. If King's nonviolence and specifically Christian form of universalism put limits on his capacity to inspire antiapartheid freedom fighters in South Africa, a secular ideology of human liberation that is mainly Western in derivation has resolved the "separate or together" issue by choosing a form of "integration" that seems, on the surface at least, akin to what King was fighting for. Malcolm X and his Black Power disciples appear in this account in the role of pied pipers who led some young South African blacks away from the straight-and-narrow path of nonracialism in the 1970s by promulgating "Black Consciousness"; fortunately, in Frederikse's view, most of these young militants later found their way back to the true cause of color-blind liberation.
Americans, especially liberal whites, who look back with nostalgia on the "black and white together" spirit of the civil rights movement of
the early 1960s might be tempted to contrast South African nonracialism with the tendency toward race consciousness and separatism that has persisted in African American politics and ideology since the late 1960s (a black nationalist strain that is evident not only in Cone's book but also in the popular films of Spike Lee and in the social relations that are visible on every college campus) and to wonder how we might emulate the South African spirit of togetherness.
It would be a serious mistake, however, to make Frederikse's "nonracialism" a synonym for what was usually meant by "integration" in the 1960s. Integration meant primarily the assimilation of African Americans with middle-class credentials into the white middle class. Frederikse firmly repudiates such a program for incorporating a black bourgeoisie into the existing social and economic system. She identifies such a doctrine with a South African liberal tradition that sought to maintain white supremacy and avoid the liberation of the black masses by creating and coopting a black capitalist elite. Frederikse's version of nonracialism is unlikely to travel well to the United States, because its fundamental assumptions are Marxist rather than liberal-capitalist.
The Unbreakable Thread presents a kind of conversion narrative in which an advocate of Black Consciousness comes to realize that the basis of apartheid is "class" not "race" and that racism is caused by capitalism. It follows that racism can only be eliminated by the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a socialist order. The kind of whites who can hope to become brothers-or-sisters-in-arms with blacks in the antiapartheid struggle are described succinctly and clearly in the ANC policy document of 1969 admitting whites for the first time to full membership in the organization:
Whatever instruments are created to give expression to the unity of the liberation drive, they must accommodate two fundamental propositions. Firstly, they must not be ambiguous on the primary role of the most oppressed African mass, and secondly, those belonging to other oppressed groups and those few white revolutionaries [my italics] who show themselves ready to make common cause with our aspirations must be fully integrated on the basis of individual equality.[17]
Frederikse, Unbreakable Thread, 100.
In practice "white revolutionaries" usually meant white members of the South African Communist party. One of them, Joe Slovo, rose to a top leadership position. When it was an underground revolutionary organization, the ANC's version of an "integrated" movement meant the incorporation of the only whites the leadership found trustworthy, those who were committed to a Marxist conception of the struggle.
White liberals and social democrats, even those who joined the integrated and resolutely nonracial Liberal party in the 1950s and 1960s, were not, for the most part, considered potential allies mainly because their anticommunism was viewed as divisive.
If Frederikse's documentary history were the whole story of nonracialism, one might have legitimate reason to view her ideas as merely an extrapolation from Marxist doctrine and also conclude that the ANC was a thoroughly Communist-dominated organization during the period from its banning in 1960 to 1989 (where her coverage ends). But she somewhat slights the other main source of the nonracialist tradition—the South African variant of the social Christianity that influenced Martin Luther King, Jr., in the United States. Entirely absent from the documents demonstrating the meaning of nonracialism are extracts from the speeches of Albert Lutuli, the non-Marxist Christian who was president-general of the ANC from 1952 to 1967, or testimony from notable Christian supporters of the ANC who could have been interviewed, such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Rev. Allan Boesak, and the Reverend Beyers Naudé.
It is useful to hear the views of the white leftists who are featured in the volume, but their secular and materialist perspective does not exhaust the meaning of nonracialism. The decision of the ANC leadership to include Naudé, an Afrikaner ordained in the Dutch Reformed Church, as one of two whites on its negotiating team showed the leadership was more sensitive than Frederikse is to the contribution of Christians who were led by their faith into antiapartheid activism. Conflict between the Christians and the Marxists in the organization has been minimal. For the most part the Christian element in the ANC was committed to a liberation theology, similar to that of Latin American clerical revolutionaries, and therefore viewed a struggle against capitalism on behalf of God's poor as a fulfillment of the Gospel.[18]
See Louise Kretzchmar, The Voice of Black Theology in South Africa (Johannesburg, 1986).
In sharp contrast to Cone's effort to synthesize aspects of the nationalist and integrationist traditions in African American thought, Frederikse treats the black nationalist strain in the struggle against apartheid as an unfortunate deviation from the nonracialism triumphant in the ANC. She provides documents reflecting the views of the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), founded in 1959 by a group of former ANC activists who objected to the kind of cooperation between Africans and radical whites and Indians that the ANC was then prescribing.
She includes an account of the Black Consciousness movement of the late 1960s and 1970s that broadened the definition of "black" to include Indians and "Coloreds," but rejected association with white opponents of apartheid. But the testimony presented from recent interviews with people who were involved with such movements in the past stresses the extent to which they outgrew such a limiting philosophy. Some of them see Black Consciousness as a stage that had to be gone through on the path to nonracialism, while others have come to the conclusion that such notions were misguided from the beginning. A good example of the ANC view of Black Consciousness comes from Steve Tshwete, who was imprisoned on Robben Island from 1964 to 1979 and who had much to do with changing the views of the Black Consciousness advocates who were added to the community of political prisoners in the late 1970s:
We knew that it was the responsibility of the revolutionary movement to direct the Black Consciousness Movement into more progressive positions. I mean, we certainly knew that BC could give problems in the long run, by reason of it being colour politics. Colour politics are dangerous. They are just as bad as tribal politics, you know. That's why we know that the imperialist countries were very much interested in boosting Black Consciousness, knowing that politics of the skin are going to blunt the revolutionary drive of the working class, and in particular, the anti-imperialist nature of the struggle.[19]
Frederikse, Unbreakable Thread, 161.
Advocacy of nonracialism has served the antiapartheid cause well. It has given the movement an ethical legitimacy in the eyes of most of the world that a particularistic, black nationalist emphasis could not have provided. In its specifically Marxist formulation, well reflected in Tshwete's comments, it identified the movement with an international struggle against capitalism and imperialism and consequently evoked substantial aid from the "socialist nations" and became a favorite cause of the far left in Western societies. But since it could also be interpreted as an embodiment of Christian ethics or liberal humanism, it attracted support well beyond the anticapitalist left and became the great international cause célèbre that in the 1980s led Western capitalist democracies to impose sanctions against South Africa, thereby helping to force the white supremacist regime to begin dismantling apartheid.
Frederikse's book, coming as it did at a time when the left throughout the world was having to reevaluate some of its traditional positions, invited a harder look at the ANC conception of nonracialism than one
might have been inclined to take a few years earlier. Viewed simply as a judgment that racism is a great evil and that a just society has no place for racial and ethnic discrimination, it is unexceptionable. But the way the concept is used by Frederikse—which is also how it was used by an influential element in the ANC—poses a number of problems. At a time when orthodox Marxism was in retreat throughout the world, could it have been expected to provide a workable philosophy for a postapartheid South Africa? If not, what could take its place, given the fact that the most dedicated and effective opponents of apartheid based their opposition to white racism and black chauvinism on essentially Marxist assumptions?
I was struck in 1988 when I participated in a seminar on South African history and politics at Oxford that the students, most of whom were South Africans representing the full spectrum of racial groups, tended to embrace a Marxist fundamentalism that seemed totally impervious to what was then occurring in Eastern Europe. This was especially true of the whites among them. In visiting South African campuses at about the same time, I found more adherence to orthodox Marxism among white students and faculty than one would be likely to find in any American university.
What this phenomenon reflected, I think, was a long tradition of viewing the struggle as an either/or choice of socialist revolutionism or racist capitalism. As a practical matter, given the characteristic weakness and indecisiveness of liberals in South Africa and the exacting ideological standards that the ANC applied to white adherents, virtually the only way that antiracist whites were able to attach themselves directly to the black-led struggle against apartheid was to affiliate with or support the South African Communist party. Frederikse's book clearly reflects this circumstance, since most of the examples of white nonracialism that she presents are from Communists or their sympathizers. But, it seems necessary to ask, can a genuinely nonracial South Africa be built on such an apparently outmoded sectarianism? As the ANC itself later conceded, its socialist inclinations have to be restrained if blacks are to share in the fruits of a growing South African economy. (Which is not to say that it must or can accept the opposite extreme of unfettered free-market capitalism.)
Another problem with the conception of nonracialism emerges from The Unbreakable Thread . It carries the concept to the point that denies all significance to race and ethnicity. It is one thing to say that race is a social and cultural construction rather than a natural phenomenon that
predetermines the relations among people. It is another to maintain, as some of the activists in this book do, that one can forget about it entirely in planning the future of what historically has been an ethnically and racially divided society. Consciousness of race or ethnicity reflects the historical experiences of whites and blacks, Afrikaners and English, Zulus and Xhosa. To some extent ethnic loyalties or identities have broken down under the homogenizing effects of industrialization and urbanization, but they remain psychologically powerful and will continue to be influential long after the legal basis of group differentiation has been removed. Simply denying their importance—as Frederikse's nonracialists tend to do—would seem to be a prescription for disappointment and disillusionment. A nonutopian approach to nonracialism would acknowledge the validity of ethnic loyalties and identities that do not actually involve racism—i.e., the impulse to maintain or establish domination over other groups. The Unbreakable Thread nowhere seems to acknowledge that an egalitarian cultural pluralism could have a part in the struggle against racism. The notion that class consciousness will totally supplant race consciousness in a democratic South Africa seems naive, and is contradicted by much historical experience.
Perhaps proponents of black liberation in South Africa have something to learn from African American thinkers with roots in the black nationalist tradition, like James Cone. If Frederikse's nonracialism were to be advanced as a solution for the American race problem, it is likely that Cone and many other African American intellectuals would reject it out of hand as a threat to black identity and pride. Of course a black minority is in a very different situation from a black majority. South African blacks have little reason to be worried about being swallowed up or assimilated out of existence. But a democratic and majoritarian South Africa contains large white, Indian, and Colored minorities. One-person, one-vote will not automatically protect their right to cultural freedom. One limitation of the dominant form of nonracialism is that it gives little or no thought to such matters. Before the end of apartheid, it could be argued, it was tactically unwise to pay attention to divisions among the oppressed, and unnecessary, or beside the point, to worry about how white communities would fare in a black-dominated South Africa. But in the 1990s, such issues have to be confronted. It is doubtful that an orthodox Marxist version of nonracialism provides an adequate basis to deal with them justly and effectively.
Benjamin Pogrund's Sobukwe and Apartheid gives us the opportunity to evaluate other visions of the struggle against apartheid. The author is a white liberal journalist, and the subject, Robert Sobukwe, was the leading proponent of an "Africanist" alternative to the ANC's brand of nonracialism in the late 1950s. Somewhat in the vein of Donald Wood's book about Steve Biko, it is the history of a friendship across racial and ideological lines as well as a biography.[20]
Benjamin Pogrund, Sobukwe and Apartheid (New Brunswick, N.J.), 1991. See also Donald Woods, Biko (New York, 1979).
Robert Sobukwe was an intellectual and politician of mixed tribal background—his mother was a Xhosa, his father a Sotho—who joined the militant ANC Youth League while a student at South African Native College at Fort Hare in the Eastern Cape Province during the late 1940s. In the 1950s, first as a teacher in African high schools and then as a lecturer in African languages at the white University of the Witwatersrand, he took an increasingly dim view of the decision by the new ANC leaders, mainly former Youth Leaguers like himself, to compromise the original Youth League aim of turning the ANC into an orthodox nationalist movement for liberation from colonial domination, similar to those emerging elsewhere in Africa.
What Sobukwe and his supporters found intolerable was the tendency to downgrade black African nationalism and the right of Africans to self-determination that resulted from ANC collaboration with radical members of other racial groups. He objected most strongly to the conspicuous role that white Communists seemed to be playing in the "multiracial" Congress Alliance of the mid-to-late 1950s. Like Malcolm X and his black nationalist successors in the United States, Sobukwe distrusted whites who embraced the black cause and sought to keep them at arm's length. He feared they would blunt the edge of black solidarity and self-reliance by influencing the movement to pursue goals that blacks had not established for themselves. He did not, however, make the kind of vituperative attacks on whites as a race that earned Malcolm X his early reputation as a black supremacist, and he proclaimed that the ultimate goal of his racially based struggle was a truly nonracial society in which each person would be accorded equal rights regardless of color or ethnicity. Indeed, he criticized the leadership of the ANC in the 1950s for its tactic of multiracial federalism in which Africans, Coloreds, Indians, and whites organized themselves separately and were viewed as having rights as groups.[21]
For a detailed discussion of the debates of the 1950s, see chap. 11.
Although sympathetic to some form of socialism that would reflect African communaltraditions, he regarded Marxism as an alien, European ideology that would distort the meaning of African liberation from racial oppression. In other words, he dissented vigorously from the orthodox nonracialism canonized by Frederikse. In a letter to Pogrund, sent from Robben Island, where Sobukwe was imprisoned in the 1960s, he summed up his lifelong conviction that race, not class, was the central element in the South African struggle:
The point is, Benjie, when we talk of European experiences, we talk in terms of class. … But in Africa particularly, though I believe this goes for Asia too, to a large extent, class interests are either nonexistent or irrelevant or muted. The oppression and the struggles are group oppressions and group struggles. In Europe when a member of the middle class wrote about the lower classes, he was writing about a different people. In this country the dichotomy is a colour one. Class distinctions within the group are muted and perhaps even discouraged and emphasis is placed on the solidarity and unity of the group.[22]
Pogrund, Sobukwe, 252.
In 1958 Sobukwe called for the secession of the Africanist faction from the ANC, and in 1959 he was elected the first president of the rival Pan-Africanist Congress. In 1960 he mounted the extensive campaign of civil disobedience to apartheid that led to the Sharpeville massacre and the banning of both the PAC and the ANC. Arrested for his part in the protest, Sobukwe was sentenced to prison for three years. When his term had been served, his imprisonment was extended indefinitely as the result of a special act of parliament. He was finally released from prison in 1969 but was kept under house arrest at his home in Kimberley until he died of cancer in 1978.
Pogrund first met Sobukwe in Johannesburg in 1957, and a friendship developed that would last until Sobukwe's death. At the time of their meeting, Pogrund was active in the Liberal party, a racially integrated organization founded by antiapartheid whites who had come to disapprove of the ANC's officially sanctioned white auxiliary, the Congress of Democrats, because of a well-founded belief that the latter was Communist-dominated. Pogrund and Sobukwe agreed that communism was an inherently undemocratic doctrine that would substitute one form of oppression for another, but they obviously could not agree on whether the struggle against apartheid should be an interracial or an all-African affair.
Contrary to his popular image, Pogrund assures us, Sobukwe was not a black racist who hated all white people. His commitment to the
idea that Africans should go it alone was based on the tactical consideration that only a racially exclusive nationalist orientation would address the realities of racial oppression in South Africa and bring the masses of black people into the struggle. Pogrund argued in vain that racial consciousness and hostility to whites were not attitudes that could be easily changed after white domination was ended; like other liberals, he worried about the danger of white supremacy turning into black supremacy and was not reassured by Sobukwe's personal commitment to the "ultimate" achievement of a nonracial, egalitarian society.
Although Pogrund does not make a point of it, Sobukwe can also be criticized for his disastrous miscalculation of the possibilities for sudden black liberation in 1960. Unlike the ANC, which had learned from earlier campaigns that the apartheid regime should not be confronted by widespread direct action until the people at the grass roots had been effectively organized and educated, the PAC leadership believed that promulgating the correct liberationist doctrine (essentially that Africans should rise up to reclaim their birthright as masters of their ancestral homeland), and the exemplary action of PAC supporters going to jail rather than obeying racist laws, would evoke a spontaneous uprising of the masses that would quickly bring the apartheid regime to its knees.
When the PAC led crowds of Africans to turn in their passes and accept imprisonment, hoping that the movement would grow when they did so, they failed to take account of the readiness to shoot down unarmed blacks that the police would demonstrate at Sharpeville and the capacity of the government to respond in a repressive fashion to the violence and disorder that its propaganda subsequently blamed on the African protesters. They also overestimated the readiness of the masses to risk everything in a bid for liberation. Their romantic, populist conception of black revolution led to the banning and virtual decimation of their own organization and also forced the rival ANC underground and into exile.[23]
See Tom Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa since 1945 (London, 1983), 201-230.
Whatever limitations might be found in its ideology, the ANC was, and has remained, a more realistic and tactically supple organization than the PAC. (The characteristic idealism and rigidity of the PAC was manifested in the early 1990s in its opposition to all negotiations with the white government.) Communist influence in the ANC has probably contributed to this pragmatism and flexibility, just as it has
helped to sustain the ideal of nonracialism. Communist doctrine has no place for "premature revolutionaries" or for "propaganda of the deed." It also favors "popular fronts" with non-Communist "progressive" forces at times when revolutionary conditions do not exist. Paradoxically, therefore, the Communists have been, on the whole, a moderating and steadying element in the ANC; however objectionable their underlying ideology and ultimate objectives may be, they have contributed to the discipline and cohesiveness of the ANC as a liberation movement.
It is not surprising, therefore, that those non-Communist African nationalists who have rejected the romantic, all-or-nothing revolutionism of the PAC and have objected on Christian or humanistic grounds to its racial chauvinism found Communists to be congenial and useful allies. Thus Sobukwe and Pogrund deserve credit for their recognition of the antidemocratic implications of Communist ideology, but it also needs to be said that their polemics had the practical consequence of dividing and weakening the antiapartheid forces. Whether the longstanding alliance of the ANC and the South African Communist party is still functional and mutually advantageous under current conditions in South Africa is another question. But there is no doubt in my mind that the longstanding marriage of convenience between Communists and democratic nationalists will be difficult to dissolve.
Pogrund exonerates the imprisoned Sobukwe from any responsibility for the often disastrous career of the PAC after 1960. He maintains that Sobukwe neither authorized nor approved of the random terrorism carried out by Poqo, the PAC's underground offshoot in the early 1960s, and it is self-evident that he cannot be held accountable for the blunders, including the terrorist policy itself that virtually destroyed the movement within a few years of its banning. More surprising is Pogrund's claim that Sobukwe recanted his separatist Africanism and professed a new willingness to admit whites into the liberation movement.
What apparently persuaded him that a go-it-alone strategy should be abandoned was what he learned from Pogrund about the courageous actions of some white liberals during the Sharpeville crisis. In Cape Town, where huge PAC-led demonstrations protesting the massacre penetrated the center of the city and made the apartheid regime seem temporarily fragile and in retreat, a close working relationship developed between members of the left wing of the Liberal party and young, inexperienced PAC leaders. Liberals smuggled food to townships that
were cordoned off and blockaded by government forces, made all their offices and facilities available to the PAC, and, in defiance of the State of Emergency, used their own journal to disseminate information about the protests. Their leader, Patrick Duncan (who later became the first white member of the PAC), also helped avert bloodshed by acting as an intermediary between demonstrators and the police. Other accounts of these events do not present the role of the Liberals in so favorable a light.[24]
Ibid., 210-223, is an example of the less flattering assessments of how helpful the liberals really were.
But whatever the facts may have been, Sobukwe reportedly concluded from the accounts he received in prison thatA number of whites had given clear proof of their willingness to work as equals with blacks in a completely disinterested spirit. …
If the PAC were to be re-formed now, it would in his view be on a wholly non-racial basis.[25]
Pogrund, Sobukwe, 205.
One can only speculate what might have happened had Sobukwe gotten out of detention, lived longer, and been allowed to work politically either in South Africa or in exile. Perhaps he would have been able to create an anti-Communist, antiapartheid alliance of white social democrats and black nationalists. (Frederikse's cursory attention to the Liberal party shows at least that its position on economic reform in the 1960s was clearly social-democratic rather than liberal-capitalist.)[26]
In a pamphlet of 1966, the Liberal party called for "a combination of private enterprise and public ownership" and a program for redistributing land to African peasants. Two years later the party dissolved rather than comply with a new law prohibiting interracial political organizations.
Such a grouping does not exist in contemporary South Africa, and there seems to be little basis for its emergence. There may be reason to regard this gap in the political spectrum as a misfortune.Sobukwe's funeral in 1978, as described by Pogrund, was the scene of events that foreshadowed later developments with greater accuracy. A small riot occurred when Sobukwe's young admirers forcibly ejected Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi and some other attending black dignitaries who were adjudged to be collaborators with the apartheid regime. (Pogrund himself remained throughout the services but was prevented from delivering the eulogy that he had prepared.) This incident helped to shed light on the violent animosities currently surrounding Buthelezi and his Inkatha movement. Before he accepted office in KwaZulu homeland created by apartheid legislation, Buthelezi had been a supporter of Nelson Mandela and the ANC. For several years Pogrund and Sobukwe had a running argument on whether Buthelezi's decision to work within the apartheid system was justified. Sobukwe, even earlier than the African National Congress, concluded
that Buthelezi was a traitor to the cause of African liberation because of his willingness to accept office under the regime and because of the way he based his influence on divisive Zulu ethnic claims. Pogrund, unlike most South African liberals, eventually became converted to the negative view of Buthelezi that Sobukwe shared with the ANC, the Black Consciousness movement, and virtually all other Africans with strong claims to being part of the liberation struggle.
The subsequent violence between Inkatha and supporters of the ANC in townships had complex origins. Government backing for Inkatha, as demonstrated conclusively by revelations in the Rand Weekly Mail, encouraged Inkatha attacks on ANC supporters, often with the active support of the police. But an essential part of the background was the widespread view outside Inkatha (even before the scandal over government financing of Inkatha broke) that Buthelezi had betrayed the cause and collaborated with the enemy. However reasonable he may have sounded to many Americans, Buthelezi was absolutely anathema to a substantial part of the politically conscious African population, including many Zulus. Asking that he be seated on their side of the table during the negotiations over a new constitution invited a reaction roughly similar to what would have happened if Americans had been asked to accept Benedict Arnold as one of their negotiators at the peace conference to establish American independence from Great Britain. Revelations that the de Klerk government subsidized Inkatha activities in 1989 and 1990 gave new substance to the old charge that Buthelezi was a government stooge.
During his imprisonment Sobukwe developed a keen interest in American affairs, which he followed in the newspapers and magazine to which he was allowed access. Most remarkably, he became a devoted admirer of President Lyndon B. Johnson, to whom he gave much of the credit for the civil rights breakthrough in the United States. In a letter to Pogrund, apparently written in 1965, he characterized U.S. and South African race policies as polar opposites. Johnson, he opined, "is implementing his policy of complete equality determinedly and successfully," much to the chagrin of the South African government, which believed that racial integration could never work. Hendrick Verwoerd, the South African prime minister at the time, stood at the head of white supremacist forces throughout the world, while Johnson was "the hope of all those who stand for nonracialism."[27]
Pogrund, Sobukwe, 231.
Even Johnson's deepeningand debilitating involvement in Vietnam did not completely dampen Sobukwe's enthusiasm for the much-maligned Texan. In 1968 he expressed regret that Robert Kennedy was reportedly on the verge of challenging LBJ for the Democratic nomination and argued that if Johnson had followed his own instincts rather than the advice he had been receiving, he would have readily negotiated his way out of Vietnam.
He has one outstanding virtue for which I like him. He feels. Some say he is sentimental. And that is the man for me any day: A man who can be moved; a man who can feel anger; who can feel deep compassion. But above all a man who can weep in the presence of great sorrow and suffering.[28]
Ibid., 253.
This tribute from a South African revolutionary in solitary confinement to a reformist American president who was being repudiated by the left in his own country is unexpected and idiosyncratic, but it is nevertheless worth attention. It recalls that amazing moment in 1965 when Johnson appeared on television to give strong support to the Voting Rights Act. When the President, his voice quivering with emotion, appropriated the slogan of the Civil Rights movement, "We Shall Overcome," Martin Luther King, Jr., watching at a friend's house, reportedly burst into tears. According to King's most authoritative biographer, "His colleagues and friends had never seen him cry before."[29]
Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 405.
From the perspective of subsequent events that dimmed Johnson's luster and made him seem a tragic figure to his former admirers and merely pathetic to more cynical observers, it is difficult to recapture what may have been the finest single moment in the history of the American presidency. Somehow, Robert Sobukwe sensed the authenticity of LBJ's flash of greatness and identified with it.The contrast that Sobukwe found between a United States heading resolutely toward racial equality and a South Africa dominated by a bigoted, racist government was a reasonable interpretation of the state of affairs in the two countries in 1965. The Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, mostly the achievement of the civil rights movement but requiring the endorsement and political skills of Lyndon Johnson to turn the chants of protesters into the law of the land, had indeed "overcome" the American equivalent of South Africa's apartheid legislation. And for a time, it seemed that the struggle for equality might be broadened and carried to fruition by becoming a war on poverty and, more specifically, on the economic disadvantage entailed on African Americans by three or more centuries of slavery and racial discrimination. This at
least was what Johnson forcefully advocated in his notable address to the graduates of Howard University in June 1965:
You do not take a person who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "You are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe you have been completely fair.[30]
Quoted in Hugh Davis Graham, The Civil Rights Era (New York, 1990), 174.
But, as James H. Cone shows in his account of Martin Luther King's disillusionment between the triumph of 1965 and his assassination in 1968, national leadership faltered as the war in Vietnam made racial justice of less national concern and white opinion turned against measures to deal with the misery of northern urban blacks that was so dramatically exposed in the ghetto riots of those years. King's dream of integration and the beloved community faded; a quarter century later it has not been recaptured. The current ideal of "multiculturalism" that Cone endorses is not really an equivalent because it emphasizes what differentiates Americans rather than what might unite them.
Those Americans who still yearn for a unifying vision, a conception of integration that avoids the biases of class and culture that made the 1960s version vulnerable to the attacks of Malcolm X and the black nationalists, might learn something from South Africa. For reasons already set forth, the conception of "nonracialism," stressed in Julie Frederikse's Unbreakable Thread carries ideological freight that makes it questionable for South Africa and clearly inapplicable to American circumstances. But Robert Sobukwe's non-Marxist version of the concept—whatever one thinks of his belief that Lyndon Johnson was its exemplar—might serve as a passable ideal for both societies. Sobukwe's goal (which would be shared today by the dominant element in the ANC) was a society committed to the rights of the individual, in which race or ethnicity will in no way be a disadvantage. What must unite such a society is a commitment to the essentially liberal ideal of personal freedom and equality. By protecting the rights of the individual, it gives to voluntary associations of individuals the ability to maintain distinctive religious or cultural traditions but it gives no formal, constitutional recognition to cultural pluralism. Equal rights as a fair distribution of opportunities may require the curtailment of economic laissez faire; but freedom of thought and association makes cultural laissez faire a necessity.
It might be objected that such a system of beliefs is merely a restatement of conventional Western liberalism and is what theoretically already exits in the United States. But the fact remains that we have failed
to apply such values successfully to hierarchies of race, as well as to other persistent inequalities that can be defined as denial of equal rights. The problem facing both the United States and South Africa is how to make rights a reality and not merely pro forma. Existing concentrations of power and privilege, even when they are no longer sanctioned by law, make this exceedingly difficult—some would say impossible. But if we survey the historical and contemporary examples of societies based on different principles—ranging from dictatorship of the proletariat to the various modes of constitutional privilege and empowerment based on race, ethnicity, or religion—no better model is likely to be found.
Chapter Ten
Nonviolent Resistance to White Supremacy
The American Civil Rights Movement and the South African Defiance Campaigns
During the 1950s and early 1960s nonviolent protesters challenged legalized racial segregation and discrimination in the only two places where such blatant manifestations of white supremacy could then be found—the southern United States and the Union of South Africa. Comparing these roughly contemporaneous movements and looking for connections between them may give historians a better perspective on the recent history of black liberation struggles in the two societies, while at the same time providing social scientists with material that should be helpful to them in their search for a theoretical understanding of social and political movements aimed at overthrowing established racial or ethnic hierarchies.
The ANC's "Campaign of Defiance against Unjust Laws" in 1952 resulted in the arrest of approximately eight thousand blacks (including Indians and Coloreds as well as Africans) and a handful of whites for planned acts of civil disobedience against recently enacted apartheid legislation. The campaign did not make the government alter its course, and it was called off early in 1953 after riots broke out in the wake of nonviolent actions in the Eastern Cape. Repressive legislation, making deliberate transgression of the law for political purposes a serious crime in its own right, made the ANC wary of again attempting a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience, but it could not prevent the Congress and other black or interracial organizations from protesting nonviolently in other ways and refusing generally to cooperate with the regime in its efforts to erect barriers between blacks and whites in all aspects
of life. School boycotts, bus boycotts, noncooperation with the program of removing blacks to new townships, and mass marches to protest efforts to force African women to carry passes were among the actions of the mid-to-late fifties which the ANC led or supported. In 1960 the Pan-Africanist Congress—a militant faction that had recently seceded from the ANC because of its objections to the parent organization's policy of cooperating with the congresses established by other racial groups as well as to its relatively cautious approach to mass action—launched a campaign of civil disobedience against the pass laws that ended with the massacre of sixty-nine unarmed protesters at Sharpeville. Chief Albert Lutuli, president-general of the ANC, showed his sympathy for the Sharpeville victims by publicly burning his own pass, and the one-day stay-at-home that the Congress called to register its solidarity with the PAC was well supported. But the government quickly suppressed all public protest, and both the ANC and the PAC were banned and driven underground. After Sharpeville, nonviolent direct action no longer seemed a viable option for the liberation movement, and in 1961 some ANC leaders, in cooperation with the South African Communist party, inaugurated the era of armed struggle by establishing a separate organization to carry on acts of sabotage against hard targets.[1]
The standard historical account of the South African movement of the 1950s can be found in Tom Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa since 1945 (London, 1983), 33-230. A valuable sociological analysis written at the time is Leo Kuper, Passive Resistance in South Africa (London, 1956). Documents relating to the struggle can be found in Thomas Karis and Gwendolen M. Carter, eds., From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa, 1882-1964, vols. 2 and 3 (Stanford, Calif., 1973, 1977).
The nonviolent phase of the American civil rights movement began with the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–1956 and culminated in the great Birmingham, Mississippi, and Selma campaigns of 1963–1965. Viewed narrowly as an attack on legalized segregation and disfranchisement in the southern states, the movement was remarkably successful. It led to the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, which effectively outlawed Jim Crow and assured southern blacks access to the ballot box. It becomes immediately apparent therefore that a fundamental difference between the two movements is that one can be regarded as successful in achieving its immediate objectives while the other was a conspicuous failure.[2]
A vast historical literature on the civil rights movement now exists. A good overview is Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality, 1952-1980 (New York, 1981). A selection of interpretive essays by some of the most prominent historians of the movement is Charles W. Eagles, ed., The Civil Rights Movement in America (Jackson, Miss., 1986).
Fully explaining success or failure obviously requires an assessment of the context—what each movement was up against and what outside help it could expect in its struggle. But before looking at such limiting or favoring circumstances, we must describe and analyze the movements themselves in an effort to compare the resources and capabilities that each brought to the confrontation with white power. Furthermore, it would be mechanistic and ahistorical to ignore the possibility that movements emerging at about the same time and involving people who
in both instances defined themselves as black victims of white oppression may have influenced each other in some direct and important way. We need to know what they had in common and how they differed in ideology, organization, and leadership. What do similarities and differences in political thought and behavior as well as in social and cultural characteristics tell us about the situation of black people in these racist societies during the 1950s and 1960s? What role, if any, did internal differences play in determining the success or failure of nonviolence?
Somewhat surprisingly, there is little evidence to indicate that the two nonviolent movements influenced each other in a significant way. Before World War II, African American influence on black South African ideologies and movements had been substantial, but the use of black America as inspiration and example appears to have tapered off during the postwar years. Before the triumph of the Nationalists in 1948, black American interest in South Africa had been limited and intermittent; the African Methodist Episcopal Church had provided the most important and durable connection when it established itself in South Africa at the turn of the century. For most African Americans, Africa meant West Africa, but awareness of the white-dominated nation at the tip of the continent increased rapidly after the rise of apartheid showed that South Africa was out of step with a world that seemed at last to be moving toward an acceptance of the principle of racial equality.[3]
African American influence on black political thought in South Africa before the apartheid era is detailed in Peter Walshe, The Rise of African Nationalism in South Africa: The African National Congress, 1912-1952 (Berkeley, 1971). On the black American religious connection with South Africa, see J. Mutero Chirenje, Ethiopianism and Afro-Americans in Southern Africa, 1883-1916 (Baton Rouge, 1987), and James T. Campbell, "Our Fathers, Our Children: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa," (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1989). I explore some of these connections in Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa (New York, 1995).
Nevertheless, the Defiance Campaign does not seem to have made a great impression on African Americans. The Council on African Affairs, a group of black radicals who sought to influence American opinion on behalf of decolonization, circulated a petition supporting the Campaign that garnered 3,800 signatures—many of which came from white radicals—and $835 in donations; but this appears to be the most significant expression of African American concern. The campaign was also mentioned in passing in a November 1952 petition to the United Nations on African issues sponsored by twenty-five organizations, including the NAACP, but the Association's organ The Crisis , which commented frequently in 1952 and 1953 on the rise of apartheid, did not cover the campaign against it. By 1952 black Americans were beginning to notice African developments, especially the first stirring of independence movements in West Africa, but interest was far less intense than would be the case a few years later.[4]
Harold R. Isaacs's study of black Negro opinion on Africa, The New World of Negro Americans (New York, 1964), suggests that awareness of Africa increased during the 1950s, but that most of it was focused on West Africa and especially on Kwame Nkrumah and the successful movement for independence in Ghana. My own impression from a variety of sources is that intense interest in South Africa did not develop until after Sharpeville. On the petition of the Council on African Affairs, see Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War (Albany, 1986), 185. A review of The Crisis for 1952 and 1953 (vols. 59, 60) turned up a number of references to the injustices perpetrated by the government under the banner of apartheid, but the only way readers would have known about the Defiance Campaign was from publication in January 1953 of the text of the petition to the United Nations. See The Crisis 60, 38.
Black Americans might have been more aroused by the Defiance Campaign if it had not occurred at a time when interest in direct action
as a possible form of protest in the United States was at a low ebb. Nonviolence had been placed on the agenda of civil rights activity during and immediately after World War II with A. Philip Randolph's March on Washington Movement of 1941–1945 and the founding and first sit-ins of CORE; but by 1952 McCarthyism and the generally conservative mood in the country had made established black leaders reluctant to endorse actions that opponents of civil rights could describe as radical or subversive; they feared a backlash that would weaken popular support for a legalistic and gradualist reform strategy that was beginning to bear fruit, especially in court decisions affirming the basic constitutional rights of African Americans. When interest in nonviolence revived after the onset of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955–1956, scarcely anyone seems to have thought of invoking the South African precedent.[5]
On the fate of the March on Washington Movement, see especially Paula F. Pfeffer, A. Philip Randolph, Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement (Baton Rouge, 1990), passim. The effect of McCarthyism on CORE is described in August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942-1968 (New York, 1973), 63-71.
Montgomery, in turn, does not appear to have inspired in any significant way the dramatic bus boycott that took place in the Johannesburg township of Alexandria in 1957. Martin Luther King reacted to the Alexandria boycott by expressing his admiration for protesters who had to walk ten or fifteen miles, noting that those in Montgomery had often been driven to work, but he did not claim any connection between the two movements. The Alexandria boycott was a desperate act of resistance to a fare increase, not a protest against segregation or denial of civil rights, and replicated a similar action in the same township during World War II. At the time when Martin Luther King and the American nonviolent movement was first attracting the attention of the world, the faith of black South Africans in passive resistance was wearing thin. When direct action on a broad front commenced in the United States in 1960 and 1961, the ANC was in the process of rejecting nonviolence in favor of armed struggle.[6]
Interactions between African American and black South African ideologies and movements are dealt with in some detail in my Black Liberation. On the South African bus boycotts of the mid 1950s, see Lodge, Black Politics, 153-187. For King's comments on the South African boycott, see The Christian Century, 10 April 1957, 447. The one tenuous link I have been able to find between South African nonviolence and Montgomery is the reference to the use of Gandhi's methods in South Africa in a November 1955 speech by Harris Wofford that was brought to King's attention at the beginning of the boycott. The speech is printed for the first time in David Garrow, ed., We Shall Overcome: The Civil Rights Movement in the 1950's and 60's, vol. 3 (Brooklyn, 1989), 1151-1162 (Reference to South Africa on 1160).
The movements were connected historically in one sense, however. Both were inspired to some extent by the same prototype—Mahatma Gandhi's use of militant nonviolence in the struggle for Indian independence. King of course made much of the Gandhian example and tried to apply the spirit and discipline of satyagraha to nonviolent protests in the American South. The official statements of purpose or philosophy issued by SCLC and SNCC in the early 1960s were permeated with Gandhian rhetoric and philosophy. Gandhi was less often invoked explicitly by the Defiance Campaigners, but their methods, especially their public announcements of where, when, and by whom laws
would be disobeyed and their refusal to make bail in an effort to "fill the jails," could have been learned from a Gandhian textbook.[7]
Works that emphasize Gandhi's influence on King include David Levering Lewis, King: A Biography (Urbana, 1970); John J. Ansbro, Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Making of a Mind (Maryknoll, N.Y., 1982); and James P. Hanigan, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Foundations of Nonviolence (Lanham, Md., 1984). Taylor Branch argues in Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 (New York, 1988), that King modified Gandhi's ideas in the light of Reinhold Niebuhr's critique of them. The Gandhian statements of purpose for SCLC and SNCC can be found in Miller, Rudwick, and Broderick, eds., Black Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century (Indianapolis, 1971), 302-308. An examination of nonviolence in South Africa that stresses the use of a Gandhian model is Leo Kuper, Passive Resistance.
If both movements drew inspiration from the great Indian apostle of nonviolence, they received the message by different routes. Gandhism came to King and the American movement by way of a radical pacifism that derived mostly from the left wing of the Protestant Social Gospel tradition. King's nonviolent antecedents and mentors were from the Christian pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation and its antisegregationist offshoot, CORE. Mainly the creation of white Christian radicals like the Rev. A. J. Muste, this intellectual and spiritual tradition lacked deep roots in the black community, although it did have some notable black adherents like Bayard Rustin and James Farmer. Nevertheless, as a recent study has shown, there was a long history of African American admiration for Gandhi as a brown man who was fighting for the freedom of his people from white or European oppression. Black newspapers sometimes expressed the hope that a Negro Gandhi might someday appear to lead a nonviolent movement against racial oppression in the United States.[8]
See David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York, 1986), 66-73, and Adam Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Athens, Ga., 1987), 23-26, for accounts of how Glenn Smiley of FOR and Bayard Rustin, one of the founders of CORE, persuaded King to adopt an explicitly Gandhian rationale for the Montgomery bus boycott during its early days. The image of Gandhi in the black American consciousness is ably described in Sudarshan Kapur, Raising Up a Prophet: The African-American Encounter with Gandhi (Boston, 1992).
Gandhi cast an even longer shadow in South Africa, because he had first experimented with satyagraha as the leader of the South African Indian community's struggle for rights as British subjects in the period between 1906 and 1914. The South African Native National Congress had been so impressed with Gandhi's mobilization of Indians for nonviolent resistance that they included "passive action" as one of the methods they proposed to use in their struggle for African citizenship rights. In 1919 the Congress actually engaged in "passive action" on the Witwatersrand in an unsuccessful attempt to render the pass laws unenforceable through a mass refusal to obey them, but for the next thirty years this potential weapon lay rusting in the ANC's arsenal as the politics of passing resolutions and petitioning the government prevailed. A politically aroused segment of the Indian minority revived the Gandhian mode of protest in 1946 and 1947 when, with the encouragement of Gandhi and the newly independent Indian government, it engaged in "passive resistance" against new legislation restricting Indian residential and trading rights. With the triumph of the Nationalists in 1948 and the coming of apartheid, the Indian passive resisters gave up their separate struggle and allied themselves with the ANC. The Defiance Campaign itself was in fact jointly sponsored by the ANC and the South African Indian Congress, and several veterans of earlier Indian passive resistance struggles played conspicuous roles
teaching and demonstrating Gandhian nonviolent techniques, as well as helping to plan the campaign and participating in its actions.[9]
On Gandhi in South Africa see Maureen Swan, Gandhi: The South African Experience (Johannesburg, 1985). Early ANC interest in nonviolence is shown in Karis and Carter, From Protest to Challenge, vol. 1, 62, 65-66, 108. There is no authoritative readily available history of the Indian Passive Resistance Campaign, but much can be learned about it from recent collections of the speeches and writings of its two principal leaders. See Dr. Joseph M. Dadoo, His Speeches, Articles, and Correspondence with Mahatma Gandhi (Durban, 1991), and Monty Speaks: Speeches of Dr. G. M. (Monty) Naiker (Durban, 1991).
In neither case, however, does a tracing of the Gandhian legacy provide a full picture of the ideological origins of mass nonviolent action. Mass pressure tactics do not require a specifically Gandhian rationale; they may derive simply from a sense that less militant and confrontational tactics have proved fruitless and that it is now time to challenge the oppressor in a more direct and disruptive way. The decision of a group to engage in nonviolent direct action usually constitutes a major escalation of resistance, a shift from legally authorized protest by an elite to initiatives that are more threatening and potentially violence-provoking because they involve bringing masses of aggrieved people into the streets. A philosophical or religious commitment to nonviolence is not necessary to a choice of boycotts and civil disobedience as vehicles of resistance. In fact groups committed ultimately to a revolutionary overthrow of the existing order often embrace nonviolent action as a means of raising consciousness and encouraging the kind of polarization that will make a revolutionary upheaval more likely. In the United States, the Communist party and its allies had engaged in a variety of nonviolent protests against racial discrimination during the 1930s, including the first mass march on Washington.[10]
See Dan T. Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (London, 1973), 248-251 for an account of the Communist Party's "March on Washington" of 1931 to protest the Scottsboro verdict. For other examples of Communist-led nonviolent protest in the 1930s, see Mark Nason, Communists in Harlem during the Depression (Urbana, Ill., 1983), passim, and Sinclair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York, 1962), vol. 1, 85-88.
Communists were excluded from A. Philip Randolph's March on Washington Movement of 1941, but Randolph was clearly influenced by their example in his effort to create an all-black movement for equal rights that would go beyond the customary legalistic methods of the NAACP and use mass action to pressure the government. As a trade unionist he was also aware of the sit-down strike and other examples of labor militancy that owed nothing to Christianity or pacifism. Neither religious nor a pacifist, he found Gandhi's campaigns attractive because they showed what could be achieved by "nonviolent goodwill direct action." He represented a way of thinking that could endorse everything Martin Luther King, Jr., was doing without accepting his nonviolent theology. For Randolph and those in the movement who shared his views, it was sufficient that nonviolent direct action was a practical means for African Americans to improve their position in society—while violent resistance, however defensible it might be in the abstract, was not in their view a viable option for a racial minority. King himself not only tolerated this viewpoint in his associates but at times came close to embracing it himself, at least to the extent that he
came to realize that the effectiveness of nonviolence resulted more from its ability to coerce or intimidate the oppressor than from any appeal it made to his conscience or better nature.[11]
See Pfeffer, Randolph, 45-88 and passim. For discussions of the realistic side of King's use of nonviolence, see Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 273-274; Branch, Parting the Waters, 85-87; and Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul, 51-53. Garrow argues that King began as a naive Gandhian, but Branch and Fairclough believe that King had always been committed to a practical or realistic conception of nonviolent action.
In South Africa non-Gandhian pressures for nonviolent mass action came during the 1940s from the young rebels in the ANC Youth League who had grown impatient with the older generation's willingness to work within the system of black "representation" established by the preapartheid white supremacist governments of Prime Ministers J. B. M. Hertzog and Jan Smuts. The Youth Leaguers, among whom were Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and Oliver Tambo, favored a boycott of segregated political institutions and experimentation with more militant and confrontational methods of protest than the organization had hitherto employed. In 1949 the Youth Leaguers won control of the ANC, and the Programme of Action that was subsequently enacted called for "immediate and active boycott, strike, civil disobedience, non-cooperation. …" The spirit of the Youth League and of the Defiance Campaign that was the fruit of its action program was not based to any significant degree on a belief in the power of love to convert enemies into friends or in the higher morality of nonviolence. Indeed the very use of the term "defiance" suggests that anger more than agape was the emotion being called forth. The campaign, as its chief planner Walter Sisulu and its tactical leader, volunteer-in-chief Nelson Mandela, conceived it, was designed to enable an unarmed and impoverished majority to carry on its struggle against the tyrannical rule of an armed and wealthy minority in a more forceful and effective manner. If nonviolent methods failed, there was no firm ideological barrier to prevent the young turks of the ANC from embracing other means of struggle.[12]
On the ANC Youth League and the Programme of Action, see Walshe, Rise of African Nationalism, 349-361, and Karis and Carter, From Protest to Challenge, vol. 2, 301-339.
But there were still influential older figures in the Congress who were nonviolent in principle and not purely out of expediency. Among them was Chief Albert Lutuli whose fervent Methodist Christianity strongly predisposed him against taking up arms and sustained his hopes that oppressors could be redeemed by the sufferings of the oppressed. "The road to freedom is via the cross" was the memorable last line of the statement he made after the government had dismissed him from his chieftainship because he would not resign from the ANC. The fact that the idealistic Lutuli was elected president-general of the ANC in 1952 showed that the ANC of the 1950s, like the southern civil rights movement of the 1960s, brought together those who regarded nonviolence simply as a tactic and those who viewed it as an ethic.[13]
Speeches of Albert John Luthuli (Durban, 1991), 41-44 and passim. See also Luthuli, Let My People Go: An Autobiography (London, 1962). Despite the spelling that appears in both of these titles, 'Lutuli' is now generally accepted as correct.
Besides sharing the ideological ambiguity that seems to be inescapable when nonviolence becomes coercive mass action, the two movements tended to view the relationship of nonviolence to "normal" democratic politics in similar ways. Some forms of nonviolence are difficult to reconcile with democratic theory because they frankly seek to override or nullify decisions made by a properly constituted majority. But in both of these instances the protesters were denied the right to vote and were therefore able to argue that their employment of extraordinary means of exerting pressures were justified by their lack of access to other forms of political expression. One-person, one-vote was a major goal of both movements, and the attainment of it would presumably reduce, if not eliminate entirely, the need for nonviolent mass action, especially in South Africa where blacks would then constitute a majority of the electorate. As Chief Lutuli put it in 1952, "Nonviolent Passive Resistance" is "a most legitimate and human political pressure technique for a people denied all effective forms of constitutional striving."[14]
Carter and Karis, eds., From Protest to Challenge, vol. 2, 487.
Speaking at the Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington in 1957, King made a litany of the phrase "Give us the ballot," and promised that if it were done "we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights. … We will no longer plead—we will write the proper laws on the books."[15]Quoted in Lewis, King, 93.
In addition to such similarities of ideology and ethos, the leadership of the two movements came from a similarly situated social group—what might be described as the educated elite of a subordinate color caste. Studies of the social composition of the ANC through the 1950s have shown conclusively that the organization was dominated by members of "an African bourgeoisie" or "petty bourgeoisie" that was characterized mainly by educational and professional achievements.[16]
See Leo Kuper, An African Bourgeoisie: Race, Class, and Politics in South Africa (New Haven, Conn., 1965), 101-103 and passim, and Alan Cobley, Class and Consciousness: The Black Petty Bourgeoisie in South Africa, 1924 to 1950 (New York, 1990).
Examinations of the origins of the southern Civil Rights movement have found the spur for militant action in the rise in southern cities and towns of what one historian calls "a relatively independent black professional class."[17]Steven M. Millner, "The Montgomery Bus Boycott: A Case Study in the Emergence and Career of a Social Movement," in The Walking City: The Montgomery Bus Boycott, ed. David Garrow (Brooklyn, 1989), 512-513.
It was a special product of legalized racial segregation that such elites were not—as is often the case under less stringent forms of ethnic or colonial domination—subject to detachment and alienation from their communities by a system of rewards and opportunities that allows a favored few to move into the lower ranks of the governing institutions established by the dominant group. It might be taken as axiomatic that where race per se is the main line of division in a society, as it obviously was in South Africa and the American South, that resistance
will take the form of a cross-class movement led by members of the educated middle class. This does not mean, however, that less educated and working-class blacks made little contribution to whatever success these movements achieved. It was of course the plain folk who sustained the boycotts, often at great personal sacrifice. The point is that these freedom struggles were, and had to be, movements of peoples or communities rather than of social classes.
These similarities in the ideological and social character of the two movements did not preclude significant structural and cultural differences, to say nothing as yet of the obvious contrast of situations. The most significant structural difference between the Defiance Campaign and the nonviolent civil rights movement was that the latter grew out of a number of local struggles and was sustained by strong organizations and institutions at the community level, whereas the former was for the most part a centrally planned, top-down operation. The one area where the Defiance Campaign achieved something like mass involvement was in the cities of the Eastern Cape, where, as historian Tom Lodge has shown, it was able to build on the firm base provided by a recent history of local mobilization and protest activity. But nothing like the network of "movement centers" that was the source of the American movement existed to buttress nonviolent campaigns in South Africa. Where such centers existed in South Africa they were usually tied to labor organization and trade unions; in the United States it was the black churches and black colleges that did most to sustain local activism. Since every southern city had relatively prosperous black churches and many had some kind of higher educational facility for blacks, such an institutional matrix for community protest was widely available, whereas black unions were well-established in only a few places in the South Africa of the 1950s. Furthermore, South African black townships of the 1950s were quite different from southern black urban communities. Their populations, which included a large number of transients and illegal residents, were less socially stable and significantly poorer; there were fewer well-established cultural or religious institutions; there was a proportionately much smaller middle class and relatively little black entrepreneurship or business activity. Efforts were indeed made to establish community associations, but they had much less success than comparable efforts in Montgomery or Birmingham.[18]
The localized basis for the southern movement is set forth effectively in Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York, 1984). My view of the South African movement derives principally from Lodge, Black Politics. Lodge discusses the peculiarities of the Eastern Cape on 45-60 and passim.
Even if the forces opposing each movement had been identical in strength and determination—which of course they were not—there seems little doubt that a centralized movement like the South African
one would have been easier to repress than the more decentralized and diffuse American movement. Even before the ANC was outlawed, the government was able to hobble it severely simply by banning or arresting its top leaders. In the American South in the 1950s the NAACP was rendered ineffectual by state legal harassment that in some states amounted to an outright ban. It was partly to fill the vacuum created by persecution of the NAACP that independent local movements developed. These grassroots movements were more difficult to suppress by state action, and they flourished in places where the NAACP could no longer show itself. If such strong local communities and institutions had existed in South Africa, the government might have faced a variety of local actions that would have been much more difficult to counter than the centrally directed campaign of the ANC in 1952. (This in fact is what happened in the 1980s with the rise of the United Democratic Front, which was a federation of the community organizations that had sprung up in the 1970s and early 1980s.) When, during the mid-1950s, the Congress attempted to assume the leadership of local struggles over housing or transportation, it fell short of effectively adjusting its methods and organizational style to accommodate grassroots initiatives. The ANC supported the Alexandria bus boycott of 1957 and helped it roll back a fare increase, but it failed to turn this spontaneous expression of community grievances into a durable township organization committed to broader objectives. In the later stages of the civil rights movement, SCLC was sometimes accused of coopting local campaigns and undercutting local initiatives. But its great successes in Birmingham and Selma were the product of a skillful coordination of local, regional, and national perspectives. SCLS's genius was that it could channel and harness community energies and initiatives to make them serve the cause of national civil rights reform.[19]
See Lodge, Black Politics, 170-171 on the ANC's failure in Alexandria. My understanding of how SCLC operated is based primarily on Morris, Origins and Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul.
Besides differing structurally, the two campaigns also diverged in the less tangible realm of movement culture and ethos. As the special prominence of ministers and churches in the American movement strongly suggests, religious belief and emotion directly inspired and animated the African American protesters to an extent that could not be paralleled in South Africa. The charisma of King as prophet/saint of the movement was instrumental in making it a moral and religious crusade rather than merely the self-interested action of a social group. The opposition of large numbers of black churches and churchmen to nonviolent direct action belies any notion that African American Christianity necessarily or automatically sanctions militant protest, but
King's creative interpretation and application of the Gospel showed that it had the capacity to do so. The South African struggle, unlike the American, did not produce a Gandhi-like figure who could inspire the masses by persuading them that nonviolent protest was God's will. There was a reservoir of religious belief and practice that might have been tapped—it surfaced at times in local actions that featured prayer and hymn-singing. But the ANC leadership was composed of highly educated men who had gone to mission schools and whose religious beliefs had little connection with those of the masses of Africans, especially those who were members of the independent "Zionist" churches that served a large proportion of urbanized Africans. The rival PAC formed in 1959 made a greater effort to draw the independent churches into the struggle, but it did not have time to accomplish much before it was banned in 1960. What King did that no South African leader was able to do was to weave together the black folk Christianity that was his own cultural heritage with the Gandhian conception of nonviolent resistance to empower a cause that both inspired its followers and disarmed the opposition of many whites. Hence the nonviolence of the American movement had a soul-stirring quality, both for its practitioners and for many white observers, that the more obviously conditional and pragmatic civil disobedience characterizing the Defiance Campaign normally failed to project. Of course this resonance was in part the result of the extensive and usually sympathetic way that the national press covered the American movement and, by the 1960s, of its exposure on national television. The Defiance Campaign by contrast received relatively little attention from the white South African press and was not widely noticed abroad (which is one reason it did not serve as a model for African American passive resisters).[20]
Morris in Origins emphasizes the local religious basis of the Civil Rights movement, but note also the critique of Morris's argument by Clayborne Carson in Constitutional Commentary 3 (Summer 1986), 616-621. Carson believes that Morris "should have discussed the conflicts within the church regarding racial militancy and noted the large number—perhaps a majority—of southern black clergymen who did not become active in the Civil Rights movement or allow their churches to be used for civil rights meetings." (620-621). Lodge in Black Politics describes the grass-roots religiosity of the Defiance Campaign on 43-44 and the PAC's overture to the Independent African Churches on 81. The subject of religious influences on the South African protest of the 1950s has not been adequately studied, and generalizations must be made with caution.
The possibly decisive effects of contrasting press or media treatment suggest that the differences in the nature of the movements may tell us less about why they ultimately succeeded or failed than we are likely to learn from examining their external circumstances—what they were up against. The American protesters faced a divided, fragmented, and uncertain governmental opposition. The most important division among whites that the movement was able to exploit was between northerners who lacked a regional commitment to legalized segregation and southerners who believed that Jim Crow was central to their way of life. The success of the movement stemmed ultimately from its ability to get the federal government on its side and to utilize the U.S. Constitution
against the outmoded states' rights philosophy of the southern segregationists. When King proclaimed that "civil disobedience to local laws is civil obedience to national laws," he exploited a tactical advantage the South African resisters did not possess; for they had no alternative to a direct confrontation with centralized state power. South African black protest leaders had long tried to drive a wedge between British imperial and South African settler regimes, but the withdrawal of British power and influence beginning as early as 1906 and virtually complete by the 1930s had rendered such hopes illusory. For all practical purposes South African whites in the 1950s were monolithic in their defense of perpetual white domination. In the United States it was of course federal intervention to overrule state practices of segregation and disfranchisement in the southern states that brought an end to Jim Crow. In South Africa there was no such power to which protesters could appeal against apartheid.[21]
For an earlier formulation of these contrasts of political context, see George M. Fredrickson, 'The South and South Africa', in The Arrogance of Race: Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality (Middletown, Conn., 1988), 254-269.
The geopolitical context of the Cold War and decolonization of Africa and Asia also cut in opposite ways, ultimately helping the American movement and hindering the South African. In the United States the competition with the Soviet Union for the "hearts and minds" of Africans and Asians, especially by the early 1960s when several African nations achieved independence, made legalized segregation a serious international liability for the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations. As reasons of state were added to other factors working against Jim Crow, the federal government became more susceptible to pressures from the civil rights movement. In South Africa, on the other hand, fears of Communist subversion within the country and of Soviet influence in the newly independent African states of southern and central Africa panicked the white political leadership into pressing ahead with more radical schemes for the "separate development" and political repression of the black majority. Underlying these contrary assessments of the dangers of black insurgency was the basic difference between a white majority facing a demand for the inclusion of a minority and a white minority conscious that the extension of democratic rights would empower a black majority.
It would be cynical, however, to see nothing in the positive responses of many white Americans to the civil rights movement except self-interested calculations. White America has not been of one mind historically on the place of blacks in the republic. In the North, at least, there was an alternative or oppositional tradition in white racial thought, originating in the antislavery movement, that advocated the
public equality of the races and offered a standing challenge—although one that was only intermittently influential—to the deeply rooted white supremacist tradition that was a legacy of African American slavery. At times, as during Reconstruction and in the mid-1960s, racial liberals became ideologically dominant and were in a position to respond to black demands for civil and political equality with major reforms. (But, being liberals, they had great difficulty in addressing the problem of economic inequality.) In South Africa, by contrast, there was no white liberal tradition that went beyond a benevolent paternalism and no deep reservoir of theoretically color-blind attitudes toward democratic reform that could be appealed to. nelson Mandela caught this difference when asked by an American journalist in one of his rare prison interviews during the 1980s why he had not followed the example of Martin Luther King and remained nonviolent:
Mr. Mandela said that conditions in South Africa are "totally different" from conditions in the United States in the 1960s. In the United States, he said, democracy was deeply entrenched, and people struggling then had access to institutions that protected human rights. The white community in the United States was more liberal than whites in South Africa, and public authorities were restrained by law.[22]
Sheridan Johns and R. Hunt Davis, eds., Mandela, Tambo, and the African National Congress: The Struggle against Apartheid, 1948-1990 (New York, 1991), 193. (Excerpted from the Washington Times, 22 August 1985.)
Was it therefore inevitable that a nonviolent movement for basic civil rights would succeed in the United States and fail in South Africa? As probable as these outcomes might seem to be, one can imagine things turning out differently. It is arguable that without the astute and inspirational leadership provided by King and others that the struggle for black civil and political equality would have taken much longer. Any claim that the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 were inevitable obscures the creative achievements of the liberation movement. For South Africa the argument has been made that the 1961 decision of the ANC to sanction some forms of violence was a mistake; the full potential of nonviolent resistance had not been exhausted, and the sabotage campaign that resulted from the decision was itself a disastrous failure that devastated the organization. To support this viewpoint, one could point, as historian Tom Lodge has done, to the relative success of the last mass nonviolent action of the 1960s—the three-day stay-at-home of 1961. Lodge has also noted that the one ANC-related organization that was not banned shortly after Sharpeville—the South African Congress of Trade Unions—had a capability for politically motivated strikes that was never fully exploited. Clearly the sabotage campaign that became the center of resistance activity in the 1960s posed little
threat to white domination and turned out very badly for the ANC because it exposed its top leadership to arrest and imprisonment. If nonviolence had its inherent limitations as a resistance strategy under the kinds of conditions that prevailed in South Africa, it would be hard to establish from its record of achievement in the 1960s and 1970s that the resort to violence, however justifiable in the abstract, represented a more effective method of struggle. Of course the key historical actors, like Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and Oliver Tambo, did not have the benefit of historical hindsight and can scarcely be condemned for trying something different when nonviolent resistance had obviously failed to move the regime and had become more and more difficult to undertake.[23]
See Lodge, Black Politics, 196-199.
Although Martin Luther King, Jr., had shown some awareness of the South African campaigns of the mid-1950s—in 1957 he discussed them with the Rev. Michael Scott when both were in Ghana for the independence celebration—he first indicated a deep and abiding interest in South African developments in 1959 when he wrote to Chief Lutuli to express his admiration for the latter's courage and dignity and to forward a copy of Stride Toward Freedom . The Sharpeville massacre in 1960 and the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Lutuli in 1961 for his espousal of nonviolent resistance heightened King's interest and prompted him to speak out vigorously against apartheid. In a 1962 address to the NAACP national convention, King exemplified his doctrine of nonviolence by referring to Lutuli: "If I lived in South Africa today, I would join Chief Lithuli [sic ] as he says to his people, 'Break this law. Don't take the unjust pass system where you must have passes. Take them and tear them up and throw them away.'"[24]
Christian Century, 10 April 1957; Lewis, King, 259; King quoted in Branch, Parting the Waters, 599.
King made his fullest statement about South Africa in a speech given in London on 7 December 1964, as he was en route to receiving his own Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo.
In our struggle for freedom and justice in the U.S., which has also been so long and arduous, we feel a powerful sense of identification with those in the far more deadly struggle for freedom in South Africa. We know how Africans there, and their friends of other races, strove for half a century to win their freedom by nonviolent methods, and we know how this nonviolence was met by increasing violence from the state, increasing repression, culminating in the shootings of Sharpeville and all that has happened since … even in Mississippi we can organize people in nonviolent action. But in South Africa, even the mildest form of nonviolent resistance meets with years of punishment, and leaders over many years have been silenced and imprisoned. We can understand how in that situation people felt so desperate that they turned to other methods, such as sabotage.[25]
Martin Luther King, Jr., "Address on South African Independence," London, U.K., 7 December 1964. Library and Archives of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Change, Atlanta, Ga.
Like Mandela two decades later, King was sensitive to differences between the two contexts that would make nonviolence more feasible and effective in the American case. But in the same speech he indicated a way that nonviolence could be brought to bear against apartheid. "Our responsibility presents us with a unique opportunity," he told his British audience. "We can join in the one form of nonviolent action that could bring freedom and justice to South Africa; the action which African leaders have appealed for in a massive movement for economic sanctions." Almost exactly one year after his London speech, King made another strong appeal for sanctions in an address on behalf of the American Committee on Africa. "The international potential of nonviolence has never been employed," he said. "Nonviolence has been practiced within national borders in India, the U.S., and in regions of Africa with spectacular success. The time has come fully to utilize nonviolence through a massive international boycott."[26]
Ibid., 2; Address of Dr. Martin Luther King on 10 December 1965 for the benefit of the American Committee on Africa, Hunter College, New York City. Martin Luther King, Jr., Center, Library and Archives.
King, who gave vigorous support to the sanctions movement for the remaining three years of his life, did not of course live to see the antiapartheid movement succeed without unleashing the violent revolution that so many observers had believed would be necessary for the overthrow of white supremacy. It is now possible to argue that the breakthrough that came with the release of Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of the ANC was as much, if not more, the result of international nonviolence as the fruit of a strategy of violent resistance inaugurated by the Congress in the 1960s. The apartheid regime was not in fact decisively defeated on the battlefield or driven from power by a domestic insurrection. The armed struggle of the ANC served to remind the world that blacks were determined to be liberated from white oppression, but it was the ethical disapproval of much of humanity that destroyed the morale and self-confidence of South Africa's ruling whites, and the increasingly effective economic sanctions that persuaded its business community and those in the government whom they influenced that apartheid had no future. Of course those sanctions would undoubtedly have been lighter and the disapprobation less sharp if the domestic resistance of the late 1980s had not provoked the government into a final desperate effort to suppress dissent by force. But that domestic resistance was primarily a matter or withdrawing cooperation from the regime. Not entirely nonviolent, it was predominantly so—a great domestic boycott to parallel the international one. The spirit of Gandhi, long since repudiated by the ANC in exile, was alive and well in the United Democratic Front, the domestic movement
that rallied behind the ANC's goal of a nonracial democratic South Africa. In 1989, with the emergence of the Mass Democratic Movement, South Africa once again saw massive nonviolent actions against segregation, led this time by clergymen like Allan Boesak and Desmond Tutu—both of whom had been greatly influenced by King and the church-based American Freedom Struggle—and featuring the singing of African American freedom songs. Nonviolence may not have been sufficient to liberate South Africa, but it played a major role in bringing that nation to democracy. It would not be beyond the power of historical analogy to describe the successful antiapartheid movement as Birmingham and Selma on a world scale.[27]
Good accounts of recent developments in South Africa are Anthony W. Marx, Lessons of Struggle: South African Internal Opposition, 1960-1990 (New York, 1992), and Richard Price, The Apartheid State in Crisis, 1975-1990 (New York, 1991). An explicit repudiation of "passive resistance" on behalf of the ANC was made by Oliver Tambo in 1966. (Johns and Davis, Mandela, Tambo, 134). I learned of the extent to which the UDF represented a revival of Gandhism during the course of an interview in South Africa in July 1993 with Mewa Rambgobin, a leader of the Indian community and former treasurer of the UDF. For him, the domestic protest in South Africa during the 1980s, which featured a boycott of elections and leaders going to jail without paying fines or making bail, was a vindication of some of the nonviolent methods that Gandhi had employed in the liberation of India.
Chapter Eleven
From Black Power to Black Consciousness
In the early 1980s the pioneer comparative historians of South Africa and the United States focused most of their attention on the structures and ideologies of white domination. More recently, however, the spotlight has shifted to the experiences of those oppressed by racism and their resistance to it. "Top-down" comparisons have been superseded by "bottom-up" studies of the commonalities and interaction of black struggles against white political and cultural hegemony. These studies reveal the salience of black America as an example or inspiration for South African blacks in the period between the 1880s and the 1940s and suggest that there was more of a sense of identity or similarity than might have been anticipated from the comparisons of patterns of domination.[1]
For comparisons of white supremacy, see George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York, 1981); John W. Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (Cambridge, U.K., 1982); Stanley B. Greenberg, Race and State in Capitalist Development: Comparative Perspectives (New Haven, Conn., 1980); and several of the essays in Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson, eds., The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared (New Haven, Conn., 1981). Studies of the connections between African American and black South African ideologies and movements include J. Mutero Chirenje, Ethiopianism and Afro-Americans in Southern Africa, 1883-1916 (Baton Rouge, 1987); James Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (New York, 1995); Robert A. Hill and Gregory A. Pirio, "'Africa for the Africans': The Garvey Movement in South Africa," in The Politics of Race, Class, and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century South Africa, ed. Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido (London, 1987), 209-253; Robert Edgar, "Garveyism in Africa: Dr. Wellington and the American Movement in the Transkei," Ufahuma 6, no. 1 (1976), 31-57; Tim Couzzens, "Moralizing Leisure Time: The Transatlantic Connection, 1918-1936," in Industrialization and Social Change in South Africa, 1870-1930, ed. Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone (London, 1982), 314-337; David Coplan, In Township Tonight! South Africa's Black City Music and Theatre (Johannesburg, 1985); and David H. Anthony III, "Max Yergan in South Africa: From Evangelical Pan-Africanist to Revolutionary Socialist," African Studies Review 34 (1991), 27-55. I have made use of some of this work in my broader comparative study, Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa (New York, 1995). This essay is adapted from chapter 7 of that work.
But the study of connections and comparisons of black ideologies and movements in the two societies has not often been extended into the post–World War II era. The radicalization of the South African struggle during the postwar period made the relatively moderate American civil rights movement seem less and less relevant.[2]See Fredrickson, Black Liberation, 265-267.
Nevertheless, African American rhetoric and ideas reentered the South African struggle with the rise of the Black Consciousness movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In a pioneering work published in 1978, the American political scientist Gail M. Gerhart briefly explored the connection between the Black Power movement in the United States and its analogue in South Africa. Her work was highly suggestive; but it was not based on a deep and precise knowledge of Black Power, and it lacked the perspective that awareness of the subsequent history
of the two movements can now provide. It is worthwhile, therefore, to reexamine the relationship between Black Power and Black Consciousness in light of the enhanced understanding of the two movements made possible by the passage of time and the appearance of new scholarship.[3]
Gail M. Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an Ideology (Berkeley, 1978), 273-281 and passim.
The Black Power movement in the United States was in some respects a revival of the black nationalism promulgated in the 1920s by Marcus Garvey. But its immediate precursor and patron saint was Malcolm X, the renegade minister of the Nation of Islam. Between 1963 and his assassination in 1965, Malcolm asserted a black separatist perspective in opposition to the racial integrationism advocated by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. According to Julius Lester, an intellectual exponent of Black Power writing in 1968: "More than any other person, Malcolm X was responsible for the growing consciousness and new militancy of black people."[4]
Julius Lester, Look Out, Whitey! Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama! (New York, 1968), 91. On earlier manifestations of African American black nationalism, see Fredrickson, Black Liberation, chaps. 2 and 4.
The actual emergence of Black Power as the rallying cry for a movement took place in the context of the southern civil rights struggle of the mid 1960s. By 1965 young black activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had become disillusioned with the two cardinal principles that had previously guided the Civil Rights movement as defined by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.—interracialism and nonviolence. The failure of the Democratic party in its 1964 national convention to seat the insurgent black delegation from Mississippi had helped to discredit the white liberalism to which King had appealed. In both SNCC and CORE the spirit of "black and white together" that had characterized both organizations before 1963 had given way by 1965 to a growing feeling that the presence of whites in the movement was inhibiting the growth of black pride and initiative. By 1966 racial exclusiveness was the basic policy of both SNCC and CORE. Even stronger emotions surrounded the issue of nonviolence vs. self-defense. The brutal beatings and killings of civil rights workers who had followed King's rules for nonviolent engagement and whose pleas for federal protection had gone unanswered had created a deep reservoir of frustration and anger.[5]
The shifting attitudes in SNCC are well described and analyzed in Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 111-211, passim. On CORE's similar evolution toward separatism and away from nonviolence, see August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942-1968 (New York, 1973), 374-408.
Preparations for a civil rights march in Mississippi in June 1966 brought into the open the long-simmering conflicts between King and SCLC, and SNCC, now led by the young firebrand Stokely Carmichael. The immediate issues in Mississippi were whether whites should be allowed to participate in the march and whether a black self-defense organization, the Deacons for Defense, should provide armed protection. The compromise hammered out authorized the inclusion of both the
Deacons and white sympathizers, although relatively few whites actually showed up. On the march itself a rhetorical struggle developed between King's gospel of racial reconciliation and Carmichael's stress on polarization and conflict. Finally in Greenwood on June 16, Carmichael, fresh from being been held by the police, announced that he was fed up with going to jail and tired of asking whites for freedom. "What we gonna start saying we want now is 'black power.'" He then shouted "black power" several times and the audience shouted it back. The context reveals that the original implications of Black Power were self-defense against racist violence and an unwillingness to continue petitioning whites for equality. From now on, Carmichael urged, blacks should confront power with power rather than offer love in return for hate.[6]
A good account of the Meredith march can be found in Carson, In Struggle, 206-211. Carmichael did not actually invent the term Black Power, even in the context of the mid 1960s. Adam Clayton Powell, for one, had used it earlier. Carmichael was not even the first to use it on the Meredith march; but his usage was the first to be widely publicized.
The panic over the Black Power slogan in the white press in 1966 was due primarily to its association with violence, which made it seem part of the same spirit that was manifested in the civil disorders then taking place in northern urban ghettos. But, initially at least, the only violence that was being sanctioned was self-defense against racist assaults. The secondary association with racial exclusiveness was particularly shocking to white liberals who had identified strongly with the ideal of integration. Charges of black racism compelled African Americans to make the argument, originally put forth by Malcolm X, that blacks could not be racist because they lacked the power and inclination to dominate whites the way that whites continued to dominate blacks. Here differing definitions of racism—for liberal whites it was a prejudiced attitude and for Black Power advocates it was a hierarchical social order—made communication difficult. But the essence of Black Power was neither violence nor the exclusion of whites; it was rather self-determination for black people. According to Julius Lester, it meant simply that "black people would control their own lives, destinies, communities. They would no longer allow white people to call them ugly." Blacks were tired of having whites define who they were and what they might become, especially since white "friends of the Negro" often failed to deliver on their promises of racial justice and at times used their egalitarian rhetoric to cover up substantive inequalities.[7]
Lester, Look Out, Whitey!, 100.
During the racial polarization that took place in the years between 1966 and 1968, liberal whites tended to withdraw their active support from the struggle for racial equality, either because they believed that the goal had already been achieved or because they saw no place for
themselves in the reconstituted freedom struggle. At the same time blacks from a variety of ideological backgrounds were endorsing Black Power in the basic sense of community control and self-determination. Shortly after the events in Mississippi, a prominent group of black clergymen took out an ad in the New York Times endorsing the idea that blacks must develop "group power," because they had been oppressed as a group and not as individuals and had as much right as other American racial or ethnic groups to unify and exercise power on behalf of their own community. In 1967 a national Black Power conference was held at which a range of black organizations, including the traditionally integrationist NAACP and the National Urban League, were represented. Its principal convener, the Reverend Nathan Wright, Jr., described the purpose of Black Power as going beyond civil rights and getting black people to address themselves to "the far more basic business of the development by black people for the growth in self-sufficiency and self-respect of black people."[8]
Gayraud S. Wilmore and James H. Cone, eds., Black Theology: A Documentary History (Maryknoll, N.Y., 1979), 27; Nathan S. Wright, Jr., Black Power and Urban Unrest: Creative Possibilities (New York, 1967), 61.
These early formulations of the Black Power program did not directly challenge the status quo of American society. They did not in fact sanction either a total and permanent separation of the races or revolutionary action to liberate blacks from oppression. They merely substituted the idea of corporate or group integration for the individualist version that had previously prevailed. According to Nathan Wright, "The thrust of Black Power is toward freeing the latent power of Negroes to enrich the life of the whole nation." What blacks were doing, he argued, was following the example of other ethnic groups: "The basic American tradition is for each rising ethnic group to devise and execute its own plan for economic, political, and civic freedom and development. So it must be with the Black people of our land." Individualist integration, according to Wright, had not been a goal of other groups, and it need not be for blacks.[9]
Wright, Black Power and Urban Unrest, 7; Wright, "The Crisis Which Bred Black Power," in The Black Power Revolt, ed. Floyd Barbour (Boston, 1968), 116-117.
To be sure, Wright was one of the least militant of the major Black Power advocates of 1966 and 1967; he was essentially a conservative whose thinking recalled at times the accommodationist "self-help" tradition of Booker T. Washington. But those who used a more confrontational rhetoric often ended up advocating a reformist ethnic pluralism similar to Wright's. According to the book that in 1967 was taken as the definitive statement of the new racial philosophy, Black Power by Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, "The concept of Black Power rests on a fundamental premise: Before a group can enter the open society, it must first close ranks. " The aim was "bargaining strength in a pluralistic
society," and the model to be followed was the way that white American immigrant groups like the Jews, Irish, and Italians had been able to exert political power by voting as a bloc.[10]
Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York, 1967), 44-45.
But another argument in the book had more radical implications—the analogy made in the first chapter between the situation of African Americans and that of colonized peoples of Africa and Asia. Here the authors likened the internal form of colonialism that characterized black-white relations in the United States to the oppressive system of white domination that prevailed in South Africa and Rhodesia. If, in fact, "black people in this country form a colony, and it is not in the interest of the colonial power to liberate them," what reason was there to expect that the mobilization of blacks as a pressure group within the American political and economic system would result in their incorporation on a basis of equality? In his speeches and writings of 1966 and 1967, Carmichael gradually shifted his allegiance from the reformist model of ethnic mobilization in a pluralist society to a revolutionary model of national liberation from colonialism. "Traditionally for each new ethnic group," he had told the readers of the Massachusetts Review in September 1966, "the route to social and political integration in America's pluralistic society has been through the organization of their own institutions with which to represent their communal needs within the larger society. This is simply what the advocates of Black Power are saying." But in a speech in London in July 1967, he sounded a different note:
Black Power to us means that black people see themselves as part of a new force, sometimes called the Third World: that we see our struggle as closely related to liberation struggles around the world. We must hook up with these struggles. We must, for example, ask ourselves: when black people in Africa begin to storm Johannesburg, what will be the reaction of the United States? …. Black people in the United States have the responsibility to oppose, certainly to neutralize, white America's efforts.[11]
Stokely Carmichael, Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism (New York, 1971), 35, 97.
In London Carmichael stopped short of calling for an African American insurrection in support of the international antiimperialist struggle. By 1968, however, he was openly advocating revolution and paying homage to Frantz Fanon as the prophet of decolonization through violence. But dissension quickly developed within the radical wing of the Black Power movement between those like Carmichael who believed that blacks were victimized primarily as a race and must therefore endeavor to separate themselves from whites and deepen their connections to the African motherland and those who believed that they
also were oppressed as a class and might therefore establish alliances with other potentially revolutionary segments of American society.[12]
For Carmichael's revolutionism of 1968, see ibid., 134-136.
The most conspicuous exponents of the latter position were the supporters of the Black Panther party, initially established in 1966 in Oakland, California, and by 1968, according to historian Manning Marable, "the most revolutionary national organization in the United States." When Stokely Carmichael and other militants from SNCC attempted to combine forces with the Black Panthers, the differences of opinion on the nature of black oppression came into the open. Carmichael resigned as prime minister of the Panthers in 1969 because of the ties the party had established with white leftists. Those who had begun as Black Power radicals increasingly divided into two warring factions—those who stressed racial separatism and cultural nationalism and those who, following the Black Panthers, moved toward the Marxist conception of an anticapitalist revolution—but with the provisos that the revolution in the United States would be led by blacks from the ghettos rather than by the predominantly white industrial working class and that in the international struggle people of color rather than the most advanced segments of the proletariat would be in the vanguard. Huey Newton, the leader of the Panthers, derided those who looked to African culture as the basis of a separatist identity as "pork chop nationalists," and in Los Angeles the Panthers engaged in violent skirmishes with members of an extreme separatist and cultural nationalist group (called simply US) led by Ron Karenga. Well into the 1970s there were bitter quarrels among black radicals between separatist nationalists, who tended to become more inward looking and less confrontational as time went on, and revolutionary nationalists, influenced by Marxism-Leninism, who bore the brunt of official repression.[13]
This discussion is based mainly on Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Revolution: The Second Reconstruction in Black America (Jackson, Miss., 1991), 86-148 (quote 110); John T. McCartney, Black Power Ideologies: An Essay in African American Political Thought (Philadelphia, 1992); and William L. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement in American Culture, 1965-1975 (Chicago, 1992), 112-191. Conspicuous separatists (or in William Van Deburg's terminology "territorial nationalists"), in addition to those named above, included the poet Imamu Baraka (Leroi Jones) and Imari Obadele I (Richard Henry), founder of a sect called the Republic of New Africa. Prominent among those that political scientist John McCartney labels "countercommunalists"—but whom I prefer to call, in accordance with the terminology of the late sixties and Van Deburg's classifications, "revolutionary nationalists"—were (in addition to Newton and other Black Panther leaders like Eldridge Cleaver) James Foreman, the former SNCC leader, and Robert L. Allen, author of the book that made the strongest case for a blackled revolution against American capitalism: Black Awakening in Capitalist America (New York, 1969).
But many of those who invoked the Black Power slogan in the late 1960s and early 1970s never embraced a radical black nationalism of either variety and continued to stress the reformist ethnic pluralism that had been the original meaning of the slogan. Besides the radical versions, there were conservative and liberal interpretations of what proved to be an extremely elastic conception. These formulations eventually forced many of the radicals to disown the slogan or to see it as merely representing a stage on the way to a fully developed national consciousness. Economically conservative black leaders emphasized black self-help and entrepreneurship, virtually replicating the procapitalist "bootstrap" philosophy of Booker T. Washington. Black politicians in the Democratic party generally defined the concept as a mobilization
of black voters behind stronger civil rights legislation and liberal reform.[14]
Perhaps the most articulate and thoughtful of those who defined Black Power in this way was Shirley Chisolm, the first black woman to serve in Congress and, in 1972, the first African American to mount a serious campaign for the presidential nomination of one of the major parties. On Chisolm's significance among "the Black Power pluralists," see McCartney, Black Power Ideologies, 151-165. For a more general discussion of the pluralist tendency, see Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon, 113-129.
As the radical sixties gave way to the relatively conservative seventies, it became clear that the Black Power movement had made a significant difference in the attitudes of black America. Especially evident was a significant increase in racial pride and self-esteem. The slogan "black is beautiful" summed up the positive affirmation of black identity that had replaced the widespread sense of ugliness and inferiority that psychologists in the 1950s had found to be widespread among blacks. There was also an increasing willingness to identify with African culture; African Americans in the late 1960s and early 1970s wore African clothes, adopted African hairstyles, and began to celebrate African holidays. A coherent African American cultural ethnicity was in the process of being constructed out of a combination of African and specifically African American traditions. But in political and social terms what had triumphed was a validation of black ethnic solidarity and action within the context of a liberal pluralist society and not the radical alienation from the American political and social system that had characterized the black nationalism of a Stokely Carmichael, a Huey Newton, a James Foreman, or an Imamu Baraka.[15]
See Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon, 193-291, for an extensive treatment of the impact of Black Power on African American and American culture.
The South African Black Consciousness Movement of the 1970s appears at first glance to have been the most obvious case of imitating an American movement in the entire history of black protest in South Africa. But close examination of the circumstances of its growth and the content of its ideology shows that the African American influences were less important than local conditions and indigenous currents of thought. The reading of Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X, James Cone, and other American Black Power advocates was clearly a stimulus, but the adaptation of African American concepts and slogans was selective rather than wholesale, and the ideas appropriated were often reinterpreted to fit South African conditions.
Black Consciousness rose to fill the vacuum created by the banning of the African National Congress and the more militant Pan-Africanist Congress in 1960, but only after a hiatus of nearly a decade that saw little organized and visible political activity among Africans. The repression that succeeded in making the Congresses virtually invisible within South Africa in the mid-to-late 1960s meant that they existed thereafter mainly as émigré organizations seeking to organize guerrilla forces in neighboring African states and to rally international support against the apartheid regime. Inside South Africa the voices raised in
public against the government's racist policies during the mid-to-late 1960s tended to be those of white dissidents.[16]
On the "hiatus of the 1960s," see Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa, 251-259.
The antiapartheid liberalism of the white dissenters had little influence on the white electorate, but it did find a home on the campuses of the English-speaking white universities and came to predominate in the principal political organization on these campuses, the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). NUSAS was opposed to racial segregation and sought to involve blacks in its own activities. Although the organization was not permitted to organize on the campuses of the "tribal colleges" established under apartheid, it recruited among the small and diminishing number of Africans allowed to attend the predominantly white universities through loopholes in the separate education laws and also solicited representatives from the African colleges to attend its conventions as guests or observers.[17]
On NUSAS in the 1960s, see Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa, 257-259; Tom Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa since 1945 (London, 1983), 322-323; and Baruch Hirson, Year of Fire, Year of Asb: The Soweto Revolt: Roots of a Revolution (London, 1979), 65-68.
At the 1967 annual NUSAS conference at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, the black delegates were forced by the host institution to eat separately from whites and to occupy separate living quarters far from the conference venue. Among those subjected to this treatment was Steve Biko, a student at a medical school for nonwhites established under the auspices of the University of Natal in Durban. At the July 1968 conference Biko provoked a searching discussion of whether there was any point in Africans continuing their affiliation with NUSAS in the light of their minority status and second-class treatment. He pressed the issue again at a meeting of the University Christian Movement (UCM), another interracial organization that also met during the winter vacation period of 1968. UCM, which was allowed to organize formally on black campuses because of its seemingly nonpolitical religious character, had more black members than white, making it a better springboard for independent black political action than NUSAS. At its meetings Biko proposed the establishment of an all-black student movement to supplement NUSAS. A year later the South African Students' Organization (SASO), with Biko as its first president, was formally established. At first SASO operated under the umbrella of NUSAS, which it continued to recognize as the "national organization" of students. But in 1970 it severed all ties with the parent body and endeavored to extend the influence of its separatist philosophy—summed up in the slogan "Black man, you are on your own"—beyond black students and into the larger African community. In 1972 the Black People's Convention (BPC) was founded as a coalition of African organizations committed to the ideology that was now being
called "Black Consciousness." Another wing of the movement and perhaps its most active and creative component in the early 1970s was Black Community Programmes (BCP), the coordinating body for a variety of local self-help initiatives, such as community medical clinics and home industries for the unemployed poor. These were run by blacks for blacks, but were financed mainly by antiapartheid church groups both within the country and abroad.[18]
Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa, 259-270; Hirson, Year of Fire, 68-84; Robert Fatton, Black Consciousness in South Africa: The Dialectics of Ideological Resistance to White Supremacy (Albany, 1986), 63-80; N. Barney Pityana, Mamphela Ramphele, Malus Mpumlwana, and Lindy Wilson, eds., The Bounds of Possibility: The Legacy of Steve Biko and Black Consciousness (Cape Town, 1991), 154-178 and passim.
The government hoped for a time that the racial separatism of the movement would make it tolerant of the autonomy and eventual "independence" of black "homelands." But in 1972 the leadership of Black Consciousness rejected all governmental schemes for separate development. It did not thereby endorse violence or revolution, but its repudiation of territorial separation meant, in principle, that all of South Africa, rather than the small portions assigned to Africans by the government, was the birthright of blacks. In Biko's own words, "We black people should all the time keep in mind that South Africa is our country and that all of it belongs to us."[19]
Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa, 288-290; Aelred Stubbs, ed., Steve Biko—I Write What I Like (San Francisco, 1978), 80-86 (quote on 86).
This assertion of exclusive black ownership was an intentional repudiation of the African National Congress's policy of multiracialism. It took direct issue with the famous opening line of the Freedom Charter of 1955: "South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white." In some respects Black Consciousness was a revival of the black separatist ideas of the Pan-Africanist Congress, which had seceded from the ANC in 1959 on the issue of whether Africans should cooperate with other racial groups. In 1972 Biko's paper at a Cape Town conference on "Student Perspectives on South Africa" explicitly traced the BC ideology back to a "group of young men [in the 1950s] who were beginning to 'grasp the notion of their peculiar uniqueness' and who were eager to define who they were and what." These forerunners of BC opposed "the ease with which the leadership [of the ANC] accepted coalitions with organizations other than those run by blacks. The 'People's Charter' adopted in Kliptown in 1955 was evidence of this." In Biko's view, therefore, the Africanists of the 1950s—those who opposed the Freedom Charter and eventually broke away to form the PAC—produced "the first real signs that the blacks in South Africa were beginning to realize the need to go it alone and to evolve a philosophy based on, and directed by, blacks. In other words, Black Consciousness was slowly manifesting itself." A reluctance to cooperate with white liberals and radicals on the grounds that all whites were beneficiaries of the system of oppression and could not be trusted to act
on behalf of the black community was an attitude common to Pan-Africanism, Black Consciousness, and Black Power.[20]
Stubbs, ed., Biko—I Write What I Like, 67. It is also worth noting, however, that BC, like the PAC, was willing to tolerate the permanent presence of whites in South Africa. According to the SASO policy manifesto of 1971, "South Africa is a country in which both black and white live and shall continue to live together." (B. A. Khoapa, ed., Black Review, 1972 [Johannesburg, 1972], 40.)
But Black Consciousness departed in some significant respects from Pan-Africanism, most obviously in its definition of "black." For Biko and his colleagues, all those previously described in negative terms as "nonwhites"—Indians and "Coloreds" as well as indigenous Africans—were to be considered "black" so long as they identified with the struggle against racial oppression. Blackness then became a matter less of ancestry than of a raised consciousness. On the other hand, not all people of African ancestry and pigmentation were automatically black; those who accepted white domination and cooperated with their oppressors continued to deserve the appellation "nonwhite."[21]
Stubbs, ed., Biko—I Write What I Like, 49-53; Khoapa, ed., Black Review, 1972, 42-43.
This repudiation of a strictly genetic view of blackness paralleled a subtle and little noticed difference between the African American nationalism of the 1960s and the earlier varieties associated with Edward Blyden, Alexander Crummell, and Marcus Garvey. These forerunners were men of dark complexions who distrusted mulattos and at times openly disparaged them. But in the 1960s the foremost champion of blackness could be the light-skinned and red-haired Malcolm X. Obviously no strict genetic test was being applied, and discussion of the historical significance of skin-color variations among African Americans became virtually taboo. The implicit message was that one was as black as one felt, and that people of African ancestry who retained the integrationist view that white culture was superior to black culture continued to be "Negroes" rather than "blacks," however dark-complexioned they happened to be. Even people who were of mostly white ancestry and appearance could be as black as any other African American provided that they were part of the group that had been historically classified and treated as such (in accordance with the extraordinary American custom of considering anyone of known black ancestry to be black) and provided also that they currently identified themselves with the struggle for black liberation and self-determination. Whether or not the new American affirmation of a nongenetic blackness influenced the racial thinking of Black Consciousness, there can be no doubt that both movements made a significant innovation in identifying a race consciousness that was a matter more of existential choice and political awareness than of biological determination.[22]
See Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa, 277, for an analysis of this similarity. Gerhart, however, creates confusion when she writes that "the term black by the late 1960s in the United States had become a loose synonym for 'nonwhite'—a new catchall term encompassing all victims of racial discrimination." Clearly one had to have some specifically African ancestry to qualify as "black." Other nonwhites, such as Asians and Native Americans, have never been so designated. Hence, curiously enough, the South African designation became broader than the American. It parallels in its usage the never American designation "people of color," which was popularized by the multicultural movement of the 1980s. On the earlier and more racialistic conceptions of black nationalism in the United States, see Fredrickson, Black Liberation, chaps. 2 and 4. There may, however, be some reason to be skeptical about the depth and clarity of BC's inclusive concept of blackness. BC literature actually devoted more attention to the value of specifically African cultural traditions as a basis for identity than was fully consistent with the view that the common victimization of Africans, "Coloured," and Indians had given blackness a purely political meaning.
Another way that Black Consciousness departed from the Pan-Africanist precedent and drew closer to American black nationalism of the 1960s was in its emphasis on psychological rehabilitation as a precondition
for political resistance. The Pan-Africanists of the 1950s had believed that the masses were fully conscious of the injustices perpetrated upon them because of their race and that the anger they naturally felt made them ready at any time for a massive uprising against white domination. Leaders needed only to provide the spark in the form of some dramatic act of confrontation and provocation. But the fact that the massacre of PAC demonstrators at Sharpeville in 1960 had led to massive repression and political quiescence rather than to a general uprising of Africans had cast doubt on their belief in revolutionary spontaneity. For the advocates of Black Consciousness, the state of affairs in post-Sharpeville South Africa revealed that blacks were held in subjugation not merely by force but by their own sense of impotence and inferiority. Consequently, the primary task of their movement was to "conscientize" black people, which meant giving them a sense of pride or a belief in their own strength and worthiness. Only in this way could the psychologically debilitating effects of white domination be overcome. BC's rejection of alliances with white liberals and radicals was based on a conviction that the whites in such relationships tended to assume authority and behave paternalistically, thus preventing blacks from overcoming their inferiority feelings. Malcolm X's distinction between forced segregation and voluntary "separation" was central to the South African Black Consciousness Movement, and the slogan "Black is beautiful" had as much resonance for its adherents as it did for American Black Power advocates.[23]
Lodge in Black Politics in South Africa provides the basis for this comparison, although he does not actually make it explicitly. (See 83-86 and 323-324.)
But the idealist view that consciousness precedes praxis was more clearly and insistently affirmed in South Africa than in the United States—at least in the early and classic formulations of the Black Consciousness philosophy. The very difference in the names generally assigned to the two movements suggests a muted philosophical difference. In the United States the growth of black pride and a positive sense of identity was not divorced conceptually in most formulations from the actual exercise of black power. Awareness of a positive black identity was indeed a precondition for community organization and the application of political pressure, but consciousness was expected to be translated quickly into forceful action, and the exercise of power in turn was supposed to be essential for the full development of consciousness.
The most obvious reason that consciousness was divorced more sharply from power in early Black Consciousness thinking was the significant difference in the political rights and economic conditions of
blacks in the United States and South Africa. Only people who could vote could plan to exercise power at the polls, and it was futile to think about a separate black economy if blacks had few resources they could mobilize. Furthermore, the South African government was willing to tolerate the public expression of BC ideology only as long as it remained convinced that the movement was a purely intellectual and cultural one that was not actually proposing any kind of political resistance. After the Black People's Convention was established in December 1971 as a broad-based "political" expression of Black Consciousness, the government concluded that the rhetoric of "conscientization" was a cover for seditious action and that BC ideology could act as a stimulus to acts of defiance and insurrection. Eight BC leaders, including Biko himself, were banned in early 1973. The following year the leading BC activists in Durban were arrested for treason after they defined a government ban on holding a rally to celebrate the victory of FRELIMO over the Portuguese in Mozambique.[24]
Sipho Buthelezi, "The Emergence of Black Consciousness: An Historical Appraisal" in The Bounds of Possibility, ed. Pityana et al., 124-128.
But the idea that consciousness was itself a kind of power had an intellectual basis as well as a tactical one. One of the features of Black Consciousness that distinguishes it from the mainstream of the African American movement, was the extent to which religious beliefs and associations shaped its ideology and mode of operation. Virtually all its leaders were practicing Christians with affiliations to one or another of the mainstream interracial churches, and the movement's institutional origins were as much in churches and religious associations as in student organizations. It will be recalled that the United Christian Movement was the cradle of SASO and that the principal white patronage and financial support that the movement received was from church groups both in South Africa and abroad. Of particular importance in aiding and abetting the movement was the resolutely antiapartheid Christian Institute, led by radical white clergy. Antiracist white ministers like the Methodist Basil Moore, the renegade Dutch Reform predikant Beyers Naudé, and Anglican priest Aelred Stubbs were strong supporters and major facilitators of the Black Consciousness Movement. The ban on cooperation with white liberals did not extend to radical clergymen who saw BC as a religious movement designed to purge the church of the sin of white supremacy. A large number of black ministers, mostly within the "historic" churches originally established by European missionaries, became prominent advocates of Black Consciousness; they predominated in the leadership of the "adult" wing of the movement—the Black People's Convention. To
some extent, to be sure, association with religion was a matter of convenience for the student activists who remained in the forefront of the movement. The one place in the late 1960s and early 1970s where blacks could express themselves with some freedom was within the churches or in associations that enjoyed religious sponsorship. But it would be cynical to leave it at that and ignore genuine religious convictions of a Steve Biko and a Barney Pityana, to say nothing of the religious basis reflected in the philosophy itself. The belief that a new consciousness could transform physical reality, or that spiritual truth could overcome vast differences in power, was a profoundly religious one. It assumed that God was on the side of the most downtrodden and despised portions of humanity, and that once the sufferers realized that they were the chosen of God, the end of their agonies would be in sight.[25]
On the religious character and association of BC, see especially Fatton, Black Consciousness in South Africa, 107-119, and Hirson, Year of Fire, 78-81. On the role of religion in Biko's life and thought, see Lindy Wilson, "Bantu Steve Biko: A Life," in Bounds of Possibility, ed. Pityana et al., 20, 43-44. N. Barney Pityana, the second most important of the original student leaders, became a clergyman and eventually the director of the World Council of Churches' Program to Combat Racism.
The aspect of the American Black Power movement that had the most direct and significant impact in South Africa was an intellectual tendency that is usually viewed as peripheral to the mainstream development of black nationalism—the effort of clergy and religious thinkers to formulate a Black Theology. Beginning with the 1966 defense of Black Power by a distinguished group of African American ministers and emerging full-blown with the publication of James Cone's seminal Black Theology in 1969, this doctrine caused much controversy within religious circles but attracted relatively little attention outside of them. That the black nationalist revival of the 1960s began with Malcolm X's categorical condemnation of Christianity as a white man's religion and was stimulated by a negative reaction to Martin Luther King's Christian nonviolence made Christian theology seem like an unpromising source of Black Power sentiments. Furthermore, none of the more radical exponents of Black Power who attracted the attention of the press in the late sixties—Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown, James Foreman, T. Huey Newton, or Eldridge Cleaver—manifested a positive view of Christianity. But a small number of black ministers and theologians went to work in the late 1960s and early 1970s reformulating Christian doctrine in light of the Black Power revolt and the resurgence of nationalist and separatist ideas in the black community. When South Africans sought inspiration for a black theology of their own, they found it primarily in the writings of James Cone, a prolific author of serious theological works who was appointed a professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York after the publication of his first book in 1969. Cone was not merely a distant intellectual stimulus; he
established direct connections with black theologians in South Africa, contributing papers to their symposia and commenting on their work.[26]
The best source on the development of black theology is Wilmore and Cone, Black Theology: A Documentary History. Among its major expressions were Albert B. Cleage, The Black Messiah (New York, 1968); James H. Cone's Black Theology and Black Power (New York, 1969), A Black Theology of Liberation (Philadelphia, 1970), and God of the Oppressed (New York, 1972); and Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism (New York, 1972). A work that shows the connections between American and South African versions is Dwight N. Hopkins, Black Theology: USA and South Africa (Maryknoll, N. Y., 1989).
Cone and the theologians of Black Consciousness in South Africa agreed that white missionaries had preached a form of Christianity that helped to sustain racist and colonialist oppression. It had not only helped to justify slavery and imperialism but also taught black converts that their cultural traditions were worthless and that resistance to white domination was sinful. But this was not the fault of the Gospel itself; it had resulted rather from an interpretation of it that served the selfish interests and sinful appetites of Europeans. Blacks had the right and the need to interpret the Christian religion in light of their own situation as an oppressed people. Passages in the New Testament that presented Jesus as the champion of the poor and oppressed were the basis for a theology of liberation. Christ himself was black, if not literally at least in the sense that blackness had come to symbolize the state of being oppressed that He had been sent to overcome. In Cone's formulation of 1970, "Blackness is an ontological symbol and a visible reality which best describes what oppression means in America." For the South African black theologians, it stood for oppression in their country in an even more obvious sense. To affirm blackness as a positive identity in either society was to be freed in spirit and committed to a struggle for liberation from physical oppression. As the South African theologian Manas Buthelezi put it: "As long as somebody says to you, 'You are black, you are black', blackness as a concept remains a symbol of oppression and something that conjures up feelings of inferiority. But when the black man himself says, 'I am black, I am black', blackness assumes a different meaning altogether. It then becomes a symbol of liberation and self-articulation."[27]
James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 7. Buthelezi quoted in Louise Kretzschmar, The Voice of Black Theology in South Africa (Johannesburg, 1986), 62.
It would be wrong to suppose, however, that those in South Africa who were stimulated by Cone to pursue the project of creating a distinctive black theology ended in total agreement with his forthright apology for Black Power. In the end Cone was too extreme in his separatist rejection of whites to meet the needs of African clergy who served denominations that had both white and black communicants. Despite a recognition of the need to adapt Christian principles to particular situations, they retained a strong underlying commitment to Christian universalism.[28]
See Kretzschmar, The Voice of Black Theology, 43-70.
When Cone denied the universality of Christ's offer of salvation, arguing that "Jesus is not for all, but for the oppressed, the poor and unwanted of society, and against oppressors," he was coming too close for
the comfort of the South Africans to saying that whites were beyond redemption. According to Lutheran bishop Manas Buthelezi, the Gospel dictated a very different attitude: "It is now time to evangelize and humanize the white man," he wrote in 1973, thus reversing the original mission relationship without sacrificing the basic Christian idea of a universal salvation. In his early writings, Cone often expressed a categorical hostility to whites that seemed to make reconciliation with them impossible. He also flirted with what more orthodox Christians could only view as heresy when he affirmed that "Black Power is not only consistent with the gospel of Jesus Christ, but … it is the gospel of Jesus Christ." For Black Consciousness theologians like Buthelezi and the Colored Dutch Reformed minister Allan Boesak, reconciliation of the races could not be achieved without black liberation but it remained the ultimate goal of genuine Christians; for them the Gospel transcended human ideologies and could never be reduced to a finite political meaning. Boesak, in an important book of 1977 endorsed Black Power as "the power to be," but rejected the tendency in American Black Theology toward "a complete identification [of the Gospel] with Black Power's political program (in all its expressions.)" As critics of Afrikaner nationalism with its idolatry of the Volk , South African black theologians were on guard against making national feeling and religious faith synonymous.[29]
Cone, Black Theology of Liberation, 6; Buthelezi quoted in Hopkins, Black Theology: USA and South Africa, 99; Cone quoted in Basil Moore, ed., The Challenge of Black Theology (Atlanta, 1973), 48; Allan Boesak, Farewell to Innocence: A Socio-Ethical Study of Black Theology and Black Power (Johannesburg, 1976), 78. For a discussion of the differences, see Kretzschmar, The Voice of Black Theology, 65-68.
The differences between the versions of Black Theology promulgated in the two countries support the more general conclusion that the Black Consciousness Movement was influenced by the American Black Power philosophy but did not slavishly imitate it. The most obvious borrowings can be found in early SASO documents. The Policy Manifesto of 1970 featured the free appropriation of current African American ideas and slogans, suggesting strongly that there were significant similarities in the situation of black people in the two societies and comparable solutions to their problems. Repeating almost verbatim a famous phrase from Carmichael and Hamilton's Black Power , the Manifesto accepted "the premise that before the black people should join the open society, they should first close their ranks, to form themselves into a solid group to oppose the definite racism that is meted out by the white society, to work out their direction clearly and bargain from a position of strength." The Manifesto repudiated "integration" if it meant "the assimilation of blacks into an already established set of norms drawn up and motivated by white society," but went on to endorse an integration based on "the proportionate contribution to the
joint culture of the society by all constituent groups." In this formulation Black Consciousness was not yet a revolutionary black nationalism but rather a reformist pluralism similar to the moderate or mainstream version of Black Power. It is difficult to determine whether this seemingly unrealistic conception of what was possible in South Africa without violent confrontation reflected the honest beliefs of Biko and the founders of SASO or was, on the contrary, an expedient cover for the political organization of blacks under the eyes of a government intensely fearful of the revolutionary potential of the African majority.[30]
Khoapa, ed., Black Review, 1972, 42.
Gail M. Gerhart has uncovered an internal SASO document describing a 1970 seminar discussion on the applicability of the Carmichael and Hamilton injunction that "before entering the open society we must close ranks," which shows an appreciation of the differing contexts of Black Power and Black Consciousness. "This group," the document reports, "made the observation that an open society in this country can only be created by blacks, and that for as long as whites are in power, they shall seek to make it closed in one way or the other. We then defined what we meant by an open society. … The group ended up by stating that the original statement should read 'before creating the open society we should first close our ranks.'"[31]
Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa, 276. Emphasis added.
In his 1971 paper at the conference on Student Perspectives on South Africa, Biko discussed at some length the relationship of Black Consciousness to Black Power and argued that the influence of the latter on the former had been exaggerated. A more important impetus, he claimed, was "the attainment of independence by so many African states in so short a time. … The fact that American terminology has often been used to express our thoughts is merely because all new ideas seem to get extensive publicity in the United States." Five years later, when the government brought some Black Consciousness leaders to trial for celebrating the victory of FRELIMO in Mozambique, Biko was called to the stand and questioned closely about the origins of the movement. In answer to a question on the relationship to Black Power, he made a fundamental distinction between the two manifestations of black self-determination:
I think the end result of Black Power is fundamentally different from the goal of Black Consciousness in this country, that is, Black Power … is the preparation of a group for participation in an already established society, a society which is essentially a majority society, and Black Power therefore in the States operates as a minority philosophy. Like you have Jewish power, Italian power, Irish power and so on in the United States. The Black people
are merely saying that it is high time that they are not used as pawns by the other pressure groups operating in American society.[32]
Stubbs, ed., Biko—I Write What I Like, 69; Steve Biko, Black Consciousness in South Africa (New York, 1978), 99.
Biko's understanding of Black Power, which was probably derived mainly from Carmichael and Hamilton's book, was actually a fairly accurate perception of the concept that had survived the suppression and decline of the more radical black movements. But in distinguishing between the operation of Black Power within the context of a potentially benign American ethnic pluralism and the implied claims of Black Consciousness as a "majority philosophy" in an undemocratic South Africa, he shied away from drawing the conclusion to which his logic pointed—that reform, persuasion, and peaceful pressure, which might work in the United States, had little chance in South Africa. Elsewhere in his testimony he explicitly denied that Black Consciousness would lead to a black revolution. In a somewhat tortuous interpretation of the practical meaning of a statement of the Black People's Convention that blacks needed to form a "power bloc" for the purpose of bargaining on the basis of strength with the white community, he conceded that blacks were not yet strong enough to make radical demands and that it might take "over twenty years of dialogue between blacks and whites" to achieve real success. Eschewing "armed struggle" or even "confrontational methods" leading to civil disobedience, he affirmed that "our operation is basically that of bargaining and there is no alternative to it. It is based mainly on the fact that we believe we have interpreted history correctly that the white man anyway is going to have to accept the inevitable." Biko seemed to be saying that the methods that would work for a minority in the context of democratic pluralism in the United States would also work for a disfranchised majority in South Africa. But a more realistic assessment of the situation might have suggested that a racist minority could not be persuaded to cede power to a black majority without a fight and that it would do everything in its power to prevent the majority from gaining the kind of leverage that Biko predicted it would gradually and peacefully acquire. Biko may well have been masking his real views in an effort to keep his movement alive and within the law. But if we take him at his word, there is a considerable gap between his analysis of the situation and how it differed from the American and the kind of action that he was publicly prepared to contemplate.[33]
Stubbs, ed., Biko—I Write What I Like, 132-136.
Biko's advocacy of organization, self-help, and "conscientization"—with no clearly specified program for political resistance—resembled
the stance of cultural nationalists in the United States. Like them he seemed to be saying that for the time being black people should devote themselves mainly to building their self-esteem. Just as the African American cultural nationalists were criticized by the Black Panthers and other revolutionary nationalists for their lack of political militancy and failure to address the class basis of racial oppression, so Biko was criticized by the ANC, the South African Communist party, and assorted freelance Marxists for his idealist conception of the power of consciousness and his failure to link up effectively with the struggle of black workers for economic justice.[34]
See Anthony Marx, Lessons of Struggle: South African Internal Opposition, 1960-1990 (New York, 1982), 39-60, 194-195; and Geoff Budlender, "Black Consciousness and the Liberal Tradition," in Bounds of Possibility, ed. Pityana et al., 234-235. For a good example of white leftist criticism of BC, see Hirson, Year of Fire, passim.
But the Black Consciousness movement was not without political consequences. The circulation of its ideas beyond the colleges and universities to the high school students of Soweto helped to set off the revolt of June 1976. The brutal suppression of student protests against government efforts to require African students to have instruction in the hated oppressor language of Afrikaans touched off student strikes and riots throughout the country and plunged South Africa into its most serious domestic crisis since Sharpeville. The organization that called the demonstration of June 16—upon which the police fired with bloody proficiency—was the Soweto Students' Representative Council, which had been founded by the local members of the South African Students' Movement, a national organizational of black high school students inspired by SASO and under BC influence. The government had no doubt about who was ultimately responsible, and it proceeded to ban all of the Black Consciousness groups. The arrest, torture, and murder of Steve Biko in 1977 climaxed the massive effort to stamp out the movement with which he was identified.[35]
See Marx, Lessons of Struggle, 64-72; and Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa, 328-339.
Unlike what happened after Sharpeville, the repression that followed Soweto did not lead to a long period of political inactivity and apparent black resignation in the face of overwhelming white power. Soweto in fact is now recognized as a turning point in recent South African history; as a result of the impression it conveyed to the world of the utter viciousness of the white regime, it energized and empowered the international antiapartheid movement. Less easy to calculate but nevertheless undeniable was the effect on black South Africans of the fact that their children had been willing to risk their lives by defying the regime on an issue that involved black pride and cultural identity. The adult Black Consciousness organizations did not plan or direct the uprising, but they could take some credit for instilling the mood of black self-assertion that produced it.
Nevertheless, the historical fate of the Black Consciousness ideology after 1977 defied predictions made at the time that its way of thinking would soon predominate in the black resistance movement, eclipsing the nonracial nationalism of the ANC. An estimated 60 percent of the student rebels who fled the country after the uprising were recruited into the guerrilla army that the ANC was organizing in friendly African states. The Pan-Africanist Congress, which as we have seen was ideologically closer to Black Consciousness, was in no position to receive them in large numbers. Disabled by factionalism and incompetent leadership—and without the reliable supply of arms that the ANC received from the Soviet Union and the nonmilitary help it obtained from Western supporters—the PAC was virtually defunct by the late 1970s. While young recruits in the guerrilla army camps were being indoctrinated in the ANC view of the world by veteran émigrés, the Black Consciousness activists who were arrested and sent to Robben Island were being reeducated by Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Gavin Mbeki, and other ANC leaders who had been incarcerated there since the early 1960s. Hence it was the ANC and not organizations that tried to carry on in the Black Consciousness tradition that derived the most benefit from the "conscientization" of blacks that was occurring in the late 1970s.[36]
Keith Mokoape, Thenjiwe Mtintso, and Welile Nhlapo, "Towards the Armed Struggle," in Bounds of Possibility, ed. Pityana et al., 142-143; Marx, Lessons of Struggle, 91-105.
The main source of domestic resistance to the apartheid regime beginning in the 1980s was the interracial United Democratic Front (UDF), a coalition of organizations—African, Colored, Indian, and white—that was originally established in 1983 to protest against the constitutional changes that the government was proposing in order to give a limited form of political representation to Indians and Coloreds, but not to Africans. Indicative of the new interracialism was the fact that NUSAS, the predominantly white student organization from which SASO had seceded in 1970, was among the affiliating groups that founded the UDF, and one of its former presidents became a member of the UDF's National Executive Committee.[37]
Budlender, "Black Consciousness and the Liberal Tradition," in Bounds of Possibility, ed. Pityana, et al., 235.
The new federation quickly identified itself with the Freedom Charter and, becoming bolder, with the ANC itself. One impetus for making this connection was the fact that the ANC had grown in strength and visibility since the time before Soweto when it seemed to be merely an exile group with virtually no visible presence within the country. Its forces augmented by refugees from the Soweto uprising, the ANC was able to carry out a number of spectacular acts of sabotage within South Africa in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Since the rival
PAC remained considerably smaller and less active, the conviction grew within the black communities of South Africa that the main source of resistance against apartheid was the ANC and that its camp was the place to be if one wanted results. Embracing the Freedom Charter meant welcoming all racial groups, including whites, into the movement and setting as the goal of the struggle a racially inclusive democratic South Africa rather than a state that gave official priority to African interests and cultural values. The opposition to the Charterists, as they were now called, came from The Azanian Peoples Organization (AZAPO) and the Black Consciousness alternative to the UDF as a confederation of community groups, the National Forum. But it was clearly the UDF that won the support of most blacks and that took the lead in the wave of boycotts, strikes, and demonstrations that characterized the mid-1980s and created the last great crisis of apartheid. The rise of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), a labor federation closely allied to the UDF and the ANC, made possible a coordination of political and industrial action against the regime that went far beyond any earlier black challenge to apartheid and could be held in check only by an unprecedented (and internationally unacceptable) level of repression.[38]
Good accounts of black politics in south Africa in the 1980s can be found in Marx, Lessons of Struggle, 106-234; Robert M. Price, The Apartheid State in Crisis: Political Transformation in South Africa, 1975-1990 (New York, 1991), 152-219; and Steven Mufson, The Fighting Years: Black Resistance and the Struggle for a New South Africa (Boston, 1980).
Did the Black Consciousness movement and the closely related tradition of Pan-Africanism therefore simply shrivel up and die except in the thinking of a minority that was relegated to the periphery of the struggle? Some former advocates of BC who now joined the Charterist movement maintained that their previous persuasion had served its historical function by increasing black self-confidence and willingness to challenge white supremacy but that its racial exclusionism had outlived its usefulness. Since blacks were clearly in charge of the movement and white supporters were deferring to their leadership, the old problem of white paternalism and black deference no longer seemed to exist. Long-standing fears of "alien" Communist domination of the liberation struggle receded in the 1980s as the Soviet Union withdrew from involvement in African conflicts and as the Cold War itself began to wind down. At the same time, the Communists and Marxists of all races who continued to be influential in the organization could be counted upon to fight for a nonracialism compatible with their basic belief that consciousness of class and not of race was the key to revolutionary change.[39]
Revealing statements of former Black Consciousness supporters who embraced nonracialism as a more advanced form of struggle can be found in Julie Fredrickse, The Unbreakable Thread: Non-racialism in South Africa (Bloomington, Ind., 1990), 114-115, 134-135, 161-162.
Black Power and Black Consciousness had a great deal in common, beyond the sharing of slogans like "Black is beautiful" and "Before a
group can enter [or create] the open society, it must first close ranks." Perhaps the most durable contribution of both was to instill in many black people a new sense of self-worth and competence that made traditional patterns of racial deference impossible to maintain. The rejection of white leadership and significant participation in the freedom struggle that the two movements shared had more lasting effects in the United States, but the contrast must be qualified by the acknowledgement that a minority has reason to feel more anxious about its ability to determine its own destiny than a majority; it can much more easily find itself the instrument of some other interest than its own. Clearly the ideal of total assimilation into a middle-class society and culture that reflected only European or Euro-American values and historical experiences was now recognized as a confession of cultural inferiority and was no longer an acceptable ambition for blacks in either society. Those in the United States who had been lured by the image of a melting pot of races and nationalities and those in South Africa who had been persuaded by missionaries that Africans could be reborn as white Christians with dark skins had learned that proposing to whiten black people—literally or figuratively—was a genteel way of advocating genocide. On a more practical level the emphasis on community organization and self-help that was common to both movements had empowering consequences. In South African the communal resistance of the 1980s built to some extent on the community organizing of the 1970s, much of which was associated with the Black Consciousness movement. In the United States the election of African Americans in substantial and increasing numbers to federal, state, and local offices was the result not simply of voting rights legislation but also of Black Power's call for mobilizing the vote behind black candidates and causes. In 1986 American Black Power asserted itself on behalf of South African liberation when the political clout of African Americans was instrumental in getting Congress to pass, over a presidential veto, strong sanctions against South Africa. On balance, therefore, both movements had healthy and liberating consequences.[40]
See Price, The Apartheid State, 166-167, 251, and passim.
But the movements were far from identical, which is scarcely surprising given the fact that the contexts in which they operated were in some ways radically different. The American movement was more diverse and variegated. In a strict sense it was not a single movement at all but several related tendencies of thought and action, ranging from accommodationist "Black Capitalism" to a few attempts at antiwhite terrorism by tiny urban guerrilla groups. Between the fringes the movement divided
into ethnic pluralists, separatist nationalists, and revolutionary nationalists. The pluralists were likely to believe that mobilizing blacks as a pressure group could reform America's liberal capitalist system; the separatists wanted to secede from it culturally and, if possible, physically; and the revolutionists envisioned blacks leading an uprising of oppressed peoples and classes to overthrow it. The most militant debated among themselves the importance of a distinctive black culture in group mobilization. For some, cultural autonomy was crucial, almost an end in itself; for others it was a diversion from the politics of making a revolution against American capitalism and imperialism (which would include making appropriate alliances with other oppressed peoples). The Black Consciousness Movement, by contrast, was relatively unified in policy and leadership. It was not entirely monolithic; differences were developing even before the Soweto crisis between those who considered the oppression of blacks purely a matter of race and those who were beginning to perceive that apartheid also had a profound class dimension. But there were no dramatic schisms or major public disagreements within the movement before its suppression in 1977.[41]
On the debates within the Black Consciousness movement in the mid 1970s, see Marx, Lessons of Struggle, 75-85.
This difference reflected the contrast between protest in a liberal democracy with constitutional protection of civil liberties and in a state that permitted some freedom of speech to its white citizens but tried to maintain totalitarian control over black expression. The contrast was not absolute; SNCC, the Black Panthers, and other militant groups were victims of FBI and police harassment, "dirty tricks," and even murderous attacks. But these assaults did not occur until after the groups had worked out and promulgated their basic ideas and programs in relative freedom. The chance to write and speak freely invited a diversity of views about how best to respond to the post-civil rights predicament of blacks and provided ample opportunity for ideological and tactical disagreements. In South Africa, Black Consciousness adherents knew from the beginning that advocacy of violence or even militant nonviolence would lead to immediate proscription. The movement had to walk a tightrope between accommodation to the regime and revolutionary assertion; this balancing act limited the scope of discourse and action. Part of the explanation for the fact that Black Consciousness relied so heavily on churches and church-sponsored organizations as a vehicle for its message was that religious expression was less closely monitored than other forms. In the United States the more charismatic or notorious Black Power advocates had many forums; they were interviewed on television and radio, wrote articles for
prominent liberal journals, had their utterances reported (sometimes accurately) in daily newspapers, and published their books with major commercial publishers.
Steve Biko put his finger on the basic difference between the situations faced by the two movements. One embodied—in its most characteristic and durable expressions—the desire of a minority to be included, but on its own terms , within a society that it could never dominate. The other reflected the ambition of a majority to rule in its native land. This difference seems so fundamental that the degree of similarity our inquiry has revealed may seem surprising. But numbers are not the whole story. Blacks in South Africa were even more of a minority from the standpoint of the power they were officially allowed to exercise than African Americans. But their potential power was of course much greater. The sense of that potential power, however long it might take to be realized, may be part of the reason why representative expressions of black protest in South Africa since the 1960s have generally seemed to be delivered in a more confident and less angry tone of voice than the equivalent expressions of African American grievance.
From a pragmatic point of view, Black Power was a greater success than Black Consciousness. The pluralist version, especially in its political manifestation, clearly increased the ability of blacks to advance their own interests and defend themselves against racism. Black Consciousness, by contrast, failed to exert sufficient pressure to make apartheid unworkable and was superseded by a movement that played down BC's message of black pride and solidarity. Black Consciousness failed in practical terms because the white minority government of the 1970s was unwilling to allow blacks to acquire the kind of bargaining power that might bring genuine reform and had the strength and ruthlessness to prevent it. BC ideology was eclipsed by Charterism, not only because the ANC offered the strategic advantages already described, but also because the international pressure that the liberation struggle needed to help make the government receptive to basic change could not readily be brought to bear on behalf of a movement that seemed to be espousing black chauvinism. An inestimable advantage that the ANC possessed in its competition with the PAC and Black Consciousness groups for international support was that its official ideology transcended race in the name of a common humanity.
The American civil rights movement had succeeded in overcoming legalized segregation by appealing to a similar, color-blind ideology of human rights that it shared with enough white Americans to constitute
a working majority in 1964 and 1965. Its failure to move beyond formal rights to substantive equality provoked the Black Power reaction. In South Africa a comparable failure to move decisively beyond the repeal of apartheid toward the goal of equal opportunities for blacks and whites could also lead to the resurgence of racialism and ethnocentrism among blacks. But a government responsible to a black majority has a better chance of satisfying the aspirations of those who have been victimized by centuries of racism than one that continues to be dominated by descendants of their historic oppressors.