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 "Top-down" comparisons have been superseded by "bottom-up" studies of the commonalities and interaction of black struggles against white political and cultural hegemony.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.