Biko Lives! 9780230606494ts01.indd i 4/29/2008 9:36:32 PM CONTEMPORARY BLACK HISTORY Manning Marable (Columbia University) and Peniel Joseph (Brandeis University) Series Editors This series features cutting-edge scholarship in Contemporary Black History, underlining the importance of the study of history as a form of public advocacy and political activism. It focuses on postwar African-American history, from 1945 to the early 1990s, but it also includes international black history, bringing in high-quality interdisciplinary scholarship from around the globe. It is the series editors’ firm belief that outstanding critical research can also be accessible and well-written. To this end, books in the series incorporate differ- ent methodologies that lend themselves to narrative richness, such as oral history and eth- nography, and combine disciplines such as African-American Studies, Political Science, Sociology, Ethnic and Women’s Studies, Cultural Studies, A nthropology, and Criminal Justice. Published by Palgrave Macmillan: Biko Lives!: Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko Edited by Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander, and Nigel C. Gibson 9780230606494ts01.indd i 4/29/2008 9:36:33 PM Biko Lives! Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko Edited by Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander, and Nigel C. Gibson 9780230606494ts01.indd i 4/29/2008 9:36:33 PM For Strini BIKO LIVES! Copyright © Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander, and Nigel C. Gibson, 2008. All rights reserved. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a r egistered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–60649–4 paperback ISBN-10: 0–230–60649–0 paperback ISBN-13: 978–0–230–60519–0 hardcover ISBN-10: 0–230–60519–2 hardcover Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Biko lives! : contesting the legacies of Steve Biko / edited by Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander, and Nigel C. Gibson. p . c m. —(ContemporaryB lackh istory) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–230–60519–2—ISBN 0–230–60649–0 1. Biko, Steve, 1946–1977—Influence. 2. Blacks—South Africa— Intellectual life. 3. Blacks—South Africa—Politics and government. 4. Anti-apartheid movements—South Africa—History. 5. Political prisoners—South Africa—Biography. 6. South Africa—Politics and government—1994– I. Mngxitama, Andile. II. Alexander, Amanda. III. Gibson, Nigel C. DT1949.B55B54 2008 968.0692092—dc22 2007048529 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: July 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America. 9780230606494ts01.indd iv 4/29/2008 9:36:33 PM Contents Series Editors’ Preface vii Biko Lives 1 Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander, and Nigel C. Gibson Interview with Steve Biko 21 Gail M. Gerhart Part 1 Philosophic Dialogues 1 Biko: Africana Existentialist Philosopher 45 Mabogo P. More 2 S elf-Consciousness as Force and Reason of Revolution in the Thought of Steve Biko 69 Lou Turner 3 A Phenomenology of Biko’s Black Consciousness 83 Lewis R. Gordon 4 Biko and the Problematic of Presence 95 Frank B. Wilderson, III 5 May the Black God Stand Please!: Biko’s Challenge to Religion 115 Tinyiko Sam Maluleke Part 2 Contested Histories and Intellectual Trajectories 6 Black Consciousness after Biko: The Dialectics of Liberation in South Africa, 1977–1987 129 Nigel C. Gibson 7 An Illuminating Moment: Background to the Azanian Manifesto 157 Neville Alexander 9780230606494ts01.indd v 4/29/2008 9:36:33 PM vi CONTENTS 8 Critical Intellectualism: The Role of Black Consciousness in Reconfiguring the Race-Class Problematic in South Africa 171 Nurina Ally and Shireen Ally Part 3 Cultural Critique and the Politics of Gender 9 The Influences and Representations of Biko and Black Consciousness in Poetry in Apartheid and Postapartheid South Africa/Azania 191 Mphutlane wa Bofelo 10 A Human Face: Biko’s Conceptions of African Culture and Humanism 213 Andries Oliphant 11 Remembering Biko for the Here and Now 233 Ahmed Veriava and Prishani Naidoo 12 T he Black Consciousness Philosophy and the Woman’s Question in South Africa: 1970–1980 253 M. J. Oshadi Mangena 13 Interview with Strini Moodley 267 Naomi Klein, Ashwin Desai, and Avi Lewis 14 Interview with Deborah Matshoba 275 Amanda Alexander and Andile Mngxitama Notes on Contributors 285 Index 289 9780230606494ts01.indd vi 4/29/2008 9:36:33 PM Series Editors’ Preface Steve Biko and the International Context of Black Consciousness This collection of chapters highlights the political genius and philosophical orientation of one of South Africa’s greatest fighters—and martyrs—for freedom, Steve Biko. Biko emerged as a brilliant and provocative black writer during the 1970s, at a moment when the white minority apartheid government had convinced most of the world that mass, internal opposi- tion to the regime had been silenced. The key forces opposing apartheid, notably the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), had been brutally crushed and pushed underground, with their principal leaders imprisoned or exiled. But what the apartheid regime did not anticipate was the rise of new centers of opposition—from black churches, neighborhood centers in the townships, and school class- rooms. Black schoolteachers, artists, and poets recognized that music and poetry could be effective resources for critiquing white racism, as well as affirming the integrity of A frican culture. These grassroots institu- tions gave birth to a broad, dynamic cultural and political movement by the mid-1970s called “Black Consciousness.” Through his powerful use of language and his cultural philosophy of black pride and resistance, Steve Biko became the best-known voice for Black Consciousness, and consequently, apartheid’s greatest foe. The majority of the chapters here present a marvelous introduction to the philosophy, politics, and activism of Steve Biko, as well as mapping the broad outlines of the Black Consciousness movement of the 1970s and early 1980s. This brief preface, by contrast, seeks to explain Biko within the long memory and history of many African nationalist and black c onsciousness–oriented movements across the world throughout the twentieth century. The twentieth century bore witness to the rise of a series of what Vijay Prashad has described as “Global Revolutionary Waves.”1 The first revo- lutionary wave produced the Bolshevik Revolution and established the 9780230606494ts01.indd vi 4/29/2008 9:36:33 PM viii SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE Soviet Union. The second wave, following the aftermath of World War II, was characterized by the achievement of independence first in India and Pakistan in 1947, anticolonial warfare in countries such as Vietnam and Algeria, the communist victory in China, and subsequently, the granting of nominal independence to countries across Africa, the Caribbean, and other regions of the third world. Sometimes lost or overlooked within this grand historical narrative is that many people of African descent, espe- cially in colonial and semicolonial societies, did not take sides either with global Communism or with their imperialist masters. What they sought was the realization of “self-determination,” not sim- ply the granting of “home rule” or local political institutions that should rule them and the organization of their economies. They questioned whether Europeans or colonial whites, even those who espoused antira- cist and socialistic views, could embrace the concept of black majority rule. They sometimes perceived the struggle for what Marxists termed “ national-democratic revolution” in distinctly “racial” and ethnic terms, arguing that the generations of enslavement and suffering had produced among blacks a kind of consciousness of collective resistance that neither Marx nor Lenin had anticipated. One well-known example of black pro- test consciousness expressed as a mass movement was Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). In the turbulent period between 1919 and 1929, the UNIA established nearly two thousand branch organizations in the United States, the Caribbean, Central America and Africa, and claimed several million members and supporters. Garveyism spoke the militant language of “Race First” and “Africa for the Africans, at Home and Abroad,” rather than “workers of the world, unite.” The majority of orthodox Marxists during the 1920s perceived Garvey’s version of black consciousness as reactionary and dangerous. Appeals to “black pride” and racial separatism had the effect of dividing work- ing people on racial lines, making it easier for both capitalist employers and politicians to exploit both groups. Marxists opposed appeals to black solidarity in favor of building multiethnic, multiclass coalitions that drew upon the resources of a broader social base, in order to challenge a country’s ruling class. The black nationalist ideologies were derogatorily dismissed as a product of the rising black petit bourgeoisie, a fragile middle stratum especially in most African colonies that sometimes played a collaborationist role with white colonial elites. During the military conflicts of World War II, it become crystal clear to most anticolonial black activists that the European colonial powers would be unable to reconstruct their old empires. Certain large colonial states like India clearly were destined to become independent. But for the independence process to succeed in colonial Africa, militant organizers 9780230606494ts01.indd vi 4/29/2008 9:36:33 PM SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE ix such as Trinidadians George Padmore and C. L. R. James believed it would require the construction of transnational networks of organizers and indi- vidual colonies, mass democratic formations that had the popular support of black working people. The Fifth Pan-African Congress, organized by Padmore in Manchester, England, in October 1945, was a pivotal event in building momentum for the construction of successful anticolonial strug- gles across Africa and the British West Indies. What is also crucial to keep in mind, however, is that Padmore, an ex-communist, did not perceive his black liberation project as part of any global, proletarian struggle. Indeed, Padmore’s most influential theoretical work, published during the height of the Cold War, was titled Pan-Africanism or Communism? A generation later, in different regions of the African diaspora, African descendant peoples in the late 1960s through the early 1970s were launch- ing a series of antiracist, social protest movements that were heavily influ- enced by both Pan-Africanist and black nationalist ideologies. This was most evident in the United States, with the striking emergence of Black Power. Black nationalist icons such as Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and the Black Panther Party and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers advocated a militant, uncompromising politics of black identity and social protest. Elements within Black Power—leadership such as Angela Y. Davis and political prisoner George Jackson, and militant formations such as the League of Revolutionary Black Workers—were either communists, or were heavily influenced by Marxism-Leninism. The bulk of Black Power, however, was neither Marxist nor socialist. Its objective was twofold: the dismantling of white supremacy and institutions of white power; and the reconstruction of a positive black cultural identity, which was perceived as a necessary precondition to the building of a black united front capable of challenging white political and corporate elites. Many Black Powerites viewed the U.S. white working class as hopelessly reactionary. Only a poli- tics of black consciousness could empower black people to struggle for power, in their own name. It was inevitable that many of these same ideas about the politics of black identity, consciousness, and Pan-Africanism circulating in the United States would find a receptive home in South Africa by the early 1970s. Like Black Power in the United States, South Africa’s “Black Consciousness movement” was grounded in the belief that African-descendant peoples had to overcome the enormous psychological and cultural damage imposed on them by a succession of white racist domains, such as enslavement and colonialism. Drawing upon the writings and speeches of Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Malcolm X, advocates of Black Consciousness sup- ported cultural and social activities that promoted a knowledge of black protest history. They actively promoted the establishment of independent, 9780230606494ts01.indd ix 4/29/2008 9:36:33 PM