Internalized Colonialism and the Psychology of Liberation

In the late 1960s the idea of Black Consciousness heralded an era of alternative political awareness in South Africa. A self-empowering, vibrant, reconstructionist world view emphasized the potential role of black initiative and responsibility in articulating the power of the powerless. Between 1968 and 1976 the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) was one of the most significant developments in South Africa, not only because of the self-confident protest and rebellion that it unleashed but also “because of the questions it posed about the nature of oppositional politics in South Africa and its relation to the nature of South African society.”^[1]

Indeed, blacks in South Africa in the 1960s were ready for an ideology of liberation. The oppression of apartheid society was overt and blatant; all opposition had been silenced, and institutionalized racism flourished triumphant. Centuries of exclusionary practices led to what might be described as the “inferiorization” of blacks: Blacks were portrayed as innately inferior, accustomed to dehumanized living, sexually promiscuous, intellectually limited, and prone to violence; blackness symbolized evil, demise, chaos, corruption, and uncleanliness, in contrast to whiteness, which equaled order, wealth, purity, goodness, cleanliness, and the epitome of beauty.

Inevitably, these racist stereotypes were at least partially internalized by South African blacks, although their self-doubt never matched that prevalent among blacks in the United States, where the official proclamations of equality misled many blacks into blaming themselves, rather than discrimination, for any miseries they experienced.

But undoubtedly, apartheid society also produced self-hatred. The limited range of opportunities open to blacks gave rise to rationalizations in favor of the status quo, and self-doubts and self-accusations led some blacks to accept their oppression as legitimate. In short, blacks blamed themselves. In addition, the fragmentation of the three black groups through differential privileges and incorporation led to a reinforcement of an intrablack hierarchy.

Thus, Black Consciousness emanated from the differential material and political circumstances in which blacks were situated. Its prime movers in the early phase were relatively privileged medical students, not workers, who served as educated articulators of the plight of the underprivileged and politically excluded. Yet, unlike most medical students elsewhere, many of them came from working-class backgrounds and were not insulated from the harsh conditions of apartheid society. They were joined by other students on the newly created segregated black campuses, where they operated under severe restrictions, and had to depend on the white-dominated National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) to speak and act on their behalf—though blacks were prohibited from joining this organization.

Yet even as some blacks at the open universities worked with NUSAS, they experienced the bifurcating effects of academic integration coupled with social separation. Much of their alienation was due to the vast gap between the life circumstances of black and white students. At the University Christian Movement, too, the initial promise of a liberal alternative soon evaporated when black students once more saw themselves reduced to the role of followers. The banning of the ANC in 1960 and the arrests of its leaders meant that blacks had to rely on liberal whites to articulate the case for black rights. Steve Biko, the best-known proponent of Black Consciousness, described how such enforced passivity dulled one’s originality and imagination: “it takes a supreme effort to act logically even in order to follow one’s beliefs and convictions.”^[2]

In the editorial introduction to the 1972 annual Black Viewpoint, Biko referred to the absence of black writers in the media: “So many things are said so often to us, about us and for us but very seldom by us.”^[3] He deplored the images of dependency created for blacks by the white press and expressed the need to deconstruct the implicit interpretive connotations, underlying values, attitudes, and interests of both the financial supporters and the readership of those newspapers. Biko articulated a general insight into conquest: that defeat for the losers has always meant more than physical subjugation. It means, as two historians of the Soviet Union have described in other circumstances, “that the conquerors write the history of the wars; the victors take possession of the past, establish their control over the collective memory.”^[4] In short, the victors’ definition of reality becomes the dominant explanation.

The difficulty of working bilaterally with even the most sincere whites posed a moral dilemma for black students, who were the last to want themselves labeled racist. Yet for Biko and others the need for exclusive black organizations was very clear, something Ben Khoapa referred to as the need for “regroupment.”^[5] Blacks were considered to be an interest group, like workers in a trade union or teachers fighting their own battles. The collective segregation and oppression based on skin color therefore provided an eminently logical basis for self-assertion and independent organization. No longer would blacks allow themselves to be objectified in the negative image of “nonwhites”—instead they would reconstruct themselves as blacks, as self-defining initiators. Gone were the days when they appealed to whites by seeking to convince them that blacks too had civilized standards. Black Consciousness was about pressuring whites through contesting the self-definitions of their opponents.^[6] Accusations that this was a racist act were dismissed on the grounds that “one cannot be a racist unless he has the power to subjugate.”^[7]

Later, when Black Consciousness developed a socialist tinge, cooperation with white liberals was rejected not because of race or privilege, but because these would-be compatriots were seen as representing a bourgeois class enemy. Collaboration with representatives of racial capitalism would amount to betrayal. “Black Consciousness,” writes George Frederickson, an American historian, “had evolved from an effort to overcome a black sense of inferiority through independent, nonviolent action into an explosive combination of race and class revolutionism.”^[8] Whatever the meaning of the latter phrase, Black Consciousness remained above all an awareness-raising movement, rather than an organization that practiced revolutionary violence.

The origins of blacks’ disillusionment with nonracial opposition organizations go back to the adoption of the Freedom Charter in 1955 by the Congress of the People, which gave rise to a split between the Charterists (ANC) and those who formed the PAC. The latter’s racial definition of African later evolved into a broadly inclusive subjective one, in that it included people of any group who considered themselves African and who identified with Africa and its people (as opposed to the exploiting settlers). By contrast, Black Consciousness utilized an objective definition of black to describe all those denied privileges by whites, as well as a subjective definition of those who consciously rejected white domination in all its forms. Even Bantustan leaders fell into the former category and were recognized as such for a while by the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO).

What was distinctive about the BCM was “its originality in elaborating an ideology of hope rooted in a theology of liberation which emphasized the solidarity of the oppressed regardless of race.”^[9] Unlike the PAC, which, despite its stated goal of including all “Africans,” is perceived as narrowly Africanist, Black Consciousness as an ideology was genuinely inclusive. From its inception the new movement sought to incorporate Indians and Coloureds. However, while it had its appeal for this “middle group” in expressing political identification, as G. J. Gerwel points out, it failed to provide the psychological identity they needed.^[10] In general, the BCM enjoyed greater support from activist Coloureds than Indians, not least because some students and clergy identified with its rejection of the label “coloured” in favor of an inclusive black category that focused on political oppression. Many Indians, on the other hand, while prominent in the early leadership of SASO, came to feel rejected as insufficiently black enough, and they felt pressured to replace their cultural heritage with African symbols. Indeed, a few gave their children African names as a way of identifying with the movement. However, they were the exceptions—often alienated community members—rather than the precursors of a groundswell of Indian sentiments toward identification as blacks.

The fragile unity among the oppressed groups was frequently exposed. The ease with which Indians could be condemned for not identifying sufficiently with the black cause, and even for considering themselves a minority, is evident in a not untypical SASO newsletter article published in 1972, “Ugandan Asians and the Lesson for Us.” In addition to exonerating Idi Amin for his treatment of Asian Ugandans, the latter were portrayed stereotypically as “refusing to see themselves as part of the soil of Africa”: “middlemen who continually saw themselves as a minority and by their practice of exploitation of the Africans through money lending at inflated interest rates, through the practice of bargaining…they contributed to the growth of animosity between themselves and the Africans who saw them as a hostile exploitative minority.”^[11] Here the East African model was uncritically transposed to the South African situation, with no attention to the crucial fact that most Indians in South Africa were descendants of indentured laborers. Unlike the trading minorities and the colonial civil servants in East Africa, the majority of Indian South Africans are members of the working class. But class analysis was not a tool of the movement at this initial stage.

The categorization of Indians as exploiting traders also ignored the fact that even the minority shopkeepers had to compete with white-owned monopolies in order to corner some of the increasing African consumer market. But because the owners of family stores came into direct contact with African shoppers, unlike the white owners of larger supermarkets and department stores, Indians’ and Africans’ perceptions of each other frequently focused on unequal exchange relationships. The mutual ambivalence was reinforced by the widespread practice in Natal industries for African workers to be supervised by Indians who, in turn, had to justify to their white employers their preferential treatment. Here, then, the message of black solidarity came up against a formidable institutionalized racial hierarchy in employment.

BCM transformed negative attitudes about subordinate “nonwhites” into a positive discourse of resistance. It offered psychological support to oppressed groups by providing a model for positive identification, and sought to alleviate the self-contempt often felt by the oppressed. Despite their efforts to provide an alternative to past descriptions, however, movements such as Black Consciousness have been criticized for implicitly accepting the legitimacy of color as a marker. In doing so, it is argued, they also reinforce the accuracy of the dominant discourse of race, by which they have been signified and exteriorized as the other.^[12] In rebuttal, Sam Nolutshungu argues that “the character of the state conditions not only the terms of domination and submission but also the ideologies and political behaviour that challenge and reject it.” The very role that the state gives to national and racial oppression, Nolutshungu explains, calls forth “alignments among the subject population that are focussed primarily on the terms of political domination rather than those of exploitation.”^[13]

Notably lacking in the initial stages of the formulation of Black Consciousness was an economic perspective on the nature of exploitation. Conceptualizations of South Africa in class terms remained peripheral and there was no systematic analysis of what was later termed racial capitalism. In part, this disinterest represented the rejection of Marxism as a white ideology and as the tool of the South African Communist Party. However, this indifference also reflected the censorship of Marxist literature at the tribal universities, as well as the students’ exposure to existentialism, phenomenology, and philosophical psychology—subjects that were popular among some of the European-oriented faculty. Hence the movement’s focus on values and essences, while its rejection of capitalism was couched in terms of dehumanization and materialism, not commodity fetishism.^[14]

Although there was little of the “black is beautiful” sloganeering that characterized American black protest, the BCM was influenced by trends in the United States. The movement worked to raise consciousness about the extent to which blacks, at great costs, were trying to copy white images of beauty, and the BCM helped to restore blacks’ sense of self-appreciation and self-acceptance. Indeed, in the early stages of the movement in Natal, there were reports that some African men had beaten African women who had straightened their hair or lightened the color of their skin. One indicator of the success of Black Consciousness on this issue was the vastly reduced advertising and sale of bleaching creams in South Africa.

Barney Pityana describes the inspiration for the BCM as originating in African religious movements and prophets, in attempts by Africans to regain their land, in the history of the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union of Africa (ICU). Pityana also stresses the significance of both the Africanist and nationalist strands within the traditions of struggle. Philosophically, Black Consciousness was broadly influenced by the writings of Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon, Eldridge Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael, and Paulo Freire—each of whom expressed the humiliation as well as the dignity of the colonized and also the power of the powerless. Though the BCM turned to these works on the psychology of oppression and the exorcizing of colonial humiliation, there is little evidence in the Black Consciousness literature that, for example, Fanon’s central notion of the cleansing power of anticolonial violence found resonance among South African activists. At the early stage Black Consciousness also maintained a rather skeptical silence about the ANC’s “armed struggle.”

Unlike Black Power groups in the United States, the BCM had no need to become a revivalist movement, reconstructing a distant past and golden heritage, since African linguistic and cultural traditions had persisted despite apartheid. In the absence of the American trauma of slavery, young black Africans felt no need to search for putative roots. Leaders made a clear distinction between Black Consciousness and Black Power in the United States, where already enfranchised blacks wished to constitute themselves as a pressure group in a white majority society. In South Africa, the BCM was seen as a way of preparing people for equal participation in a transformed society that would reflect the outlook of the black majority.^[15] Psychological liberation was sought through a return to African values of communalism, shared decision making, and more personal communication styles, in contrast to the individualism of white consumer society.

Despite the BCM’s designation of the black community as communalistic, the division of labor within the BCM followed traditional sexist lines. All five officeholders in the 1972 executive were men. Women for the most part were relegated to taking responsibility for child care, moral education, and socialization in black cultural heritage, for health, nutrition, and the making of clothing. This view permeated the women’s own self-definition, as is evident in the preamble to the constitution of the allied Black Women’s Federation:

1. Black women are basically responsible for the survival and maintenance of their families and largely the socialisation of the youth for the transmission of the Black cultural heritage;

2. They need to present a united front and to redirect the status of motherhood towards the fulfillment of the Black people’s social, cultural, economic and political aspirations.^[16]

In contrast, the Institute of Black Studies, formed in 1975, was “to provide a forum where the Black man can express himself.…a platform where issues facing the country can be analysed and interpreted.”^[17]

The repetition of masculine pronouns, which prevailed in the SASO Policy Manifesto of 1971, may well have reflected and reproduced standard English usage of “he” and “man” in what was viewed as their generic sense. But despite the black cultural ideal of an inclusive communalism, the male is constructed as the empowered speaker, and women—even when included as “sisters”—are presented as the other, powerless and voiceless.^[18] The ancillary role of women in the leadership of SASO further corroborates this gender-based disparity. Few women were prominent in student representative councils or in campus activities. But structural factors may also have kept women from participating on a more equal basis—one cannot automatically attribute their underrepresentation in the movement solely to exclusionary practices.