The Law and the Prophets by Daniel R. Magaziner

Author:Daniel R. Magaziner [Magaziner, Daniel R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780821419182
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2010-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

BLACKS AND “NONWHITES”

At the outset, 1970s activists demonstrated little interest in supplanting previous liberation movements. “We already had political parties and that was not the point,” Mplumlwana told me.3 Indeed, SASO had prided itself on counting both ANC and PAC members in its ranks.4 For his part, Barney Pityana saw no conflict in remaining an ANC supporter even while founding SASO. “We needed to be a new movement that acknowledge[d] the ANC and other organizations,” he remembered, but also brought “a new cadre of young people into a consciousness of themselves that [was] not defined by where they had been or whatever loyalties they had.” Thus, in SASO, people such as Biko—whom Pityana and others described as PAC—could share space with ANC loyalists.5

In fact, although SASO was skeptical of nationalist movements and what they could and could not achieve, during its first few years it never claimed to have taken over from previous organizations. In 1971, for example, when the SASO Newsletter covered Malawian president Hastings Banda’s visit to South Africa, it excoriated him for not meeting black South Africa’s “true leaders”—not SASO but those “who are either in Robben Island, in exile or in banishment.”6 Even after forming BPC, prominent leaders such as Mandela and Sobukwe remained highly regarded, even if Black Consciousness activists claimed that, in Mandela’s case, they respected him in spite of his organization.7 Black Consciousness activists often described themselves as placeholders for the more established organizations: activists celebrated “the history and achievement of the black movements” that preceded SASO and suggested that they were merely trying prepare “the mind of the people” for the struggle that the ANC and PAC would rightfully bring. The latter organizations’ had a “practical” project, activists suggested, whereas SASO’s was a “philosophical one.”8

Questions of placeholding and intent sometimes undermined Black Consciousness’s legitimacy, especially within exile circles. As activists left the country for a variety of reasons during the 1970s, they encountered ANC members who dismissed SASO and its philosophical project as a “baby organization of confused people.”9 Indeed, despite SASO’s efforts to valorize student politics as an arena of struggle, others rejected its emphasis on philosophy as the immature or underdeveloped product of youth, especially when contrasted to the maturity signified by ANC materialist “practicality.” In some sense, then, SASO leaders such as Biko, who demurred from accepting responsibility for the “stages” following conscientization, helped to create the image of Black Consciousness as something to be grown out of.10

Yet many did not accept the notion that there were two conversions—one leading from apathy to blackness, the other from Black Consciousness to some higher stage of political awareness. Biko might not have been interested in making a political party, but that did not stop him from indirectly attacking other parties’ failings. In the 1950s, Africanists had critiqued the ANC for being beholden to white communists; in the 1970s, Biko described it as controlled by “liberals.” During the Congress movement’s heyday, “the white liberals . . . knew what was good for the blacks and told them so,” Biko charged.

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