Decolonising critical theory
1.7. Black Consciousness and the black African subject as the “envisioned self”
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1.7. Black Consciousness and the black African subject as the “envisioned
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and the stage was left open to whites of liberal opinion to make representations for blacks, in a way that had not happened in the past, unaccompanied by black opinion” (Steve Biko in an interview with Gerhart, 2008: 21). He notes that this situation reduced black people “just to be there, and to allow whites to speak on their behalf. And all blacks were doing all this time was just to clap and say “amen”” (Steve Biko in an interview with Gerhart, 2008: 22). Biko emphasizes the importance of keeping the struggle connected to other struggles around the African continent.
Intellectually, he notes that Black Consciousness was inspired by, among others, Fanon, Senghor and Diop. He notes that “they spoke to us, you know. These people obviously were very influential” (Steve Biko in an interview with Gerhart, 2008: 23). Biko and others read a lot of African literature, by these writers and others. It can be argued that they stood in a long list of decolonial thinkers and philosophers in South Africa and this can be seen in their active reading engaged in an “active search for that type of book, for the kind of thing that will say things to you, that was bound to evoke a response” (Steve Biko in an interview with Gerhart, 2008: 24).
Biko and the black consciousness movement operated in a wide context of black struggles. It was at the same time that Robert Sobukwe led his Pan African Congress (PAC). Sobukwe was regarded as the most dangerous intellectual of his generation leading to the Sobukwe Clause that “allowed his imprisonment to be renewed annually at the discretion of the Minister of Justice” (Lebakeng, 2018: 78). Lebakeng notes that “Consequently, he was interned on Robben Island for further six years. On face this statue seemed to grant broadly applicable powers, but in essence it was specifically intended to authorize the arbitrary extension of Sobukwe's imprisonment. Sobukwe was the only person imprisoned under this clause. Due to his sense of purpose and determination to achieve the liberation of Africans, Sobukwe was considered to be extremely dangerous by the colonial apartheid regime in South Africa” (2018: 78). Sobukwe’s thoughts contain “important observations for the study of identity, culture, history, and society” (Delport, 2016: 35).
Importantly, Sobukwe was seen as a prophet of black liberation in that his thoughts lie “in an attention to the role of the historical imagination, what we can tentatively name a historical form of consciousness” which is described or defined as “a form of consciousness that stands in opposition to and looks beyond what is confined and prescribed as the current and its possibilities”
(Delport, 2016: 35). It was in thinking against the apartheid logic that Sobukwe was an inspiration to black activists like Biko and a threat to the regime. Sobukwe emphasized pan-Africanism and
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African nationalism (Delport, 2016: 35). Sobukwe “mobilised history as a theatre of struggle that tied together the realms of the psychological and the political in the quest for African liberation”
(Delport, 2016: 35). He emphasized that ““As for the world, so for Afrika. The future of Africa will be what Africans make it” (Sobukwe, 1959/2013: 477). In breaking away from the ANC after the 1955 Freedom Charter, which the Africanists, like Sobukwe regarded as a compromise, their (Africanists) desire was to restore the African to history. In part of his speech at the first annual meeting of the PAC, Sobukwe said ““We aim, politically, at government of the Africans by the Africans, for the Africans, with everybody who owes his only loyalty to Afrika and who is prepared to accept the democratic rule of an African majority being regarded as African” (Sobukwe, 1959/2014: 480). This praxis for liberation was also aimed at issues of subjectivity as he further pointed out that “socially we aim at the full development of the human personality and a ruthless uprooting and outlawing of all forms or manifestations of the racial myth” (Sobukwe, 1959/2014:
480). The aim of the liberation struggle, therefore, was the death of the European subject and the reinstatement of the black African subject in history (Delport, 2016: 39).
Sobukwe, as the torch bearer of Africanist thought was taking over from Anton Lembede and the young lions of the ANC YL. Qunta notes that “Sobukwe’s intellectual legacy should be understood from the ideological standpoint of Africanism. He was influenced greatly by the writings of Anton Lembede the first president of 2 the ANC Youth League” (2018: 1). In searching for a decolonial impulse in South Africa’s own history, decolonial impulse that looked out to Africa, it is important to consider the political thought and work of the ANC YL, especially Lembede, Mda and Mandela.
This is to say that, we have to retrieve a radical Mandela before he embraced non-racialism. The youth league was formed because young people in the movement were concerned about stagnation within the congress, organizational weaknesses, lack of ideology and “its failure to properly analyse the nature of the problem faced by Africans and the resultant tendency to react only to actions by the colonial regime” (2018: 2). The league was formally established in 1944 after the mother body’s resolution at the December 1943 conference, which also set up the women’s league.
The league’s first president was Lembede and in March 1944 the League’s Provisional Committee issued its manifesto. The manifesto substituted the ANC’s notion of trusteeship with that of self- determination and African nationalism became the new rallying cry (Qunta, 2018). It is Lembede, the ideological pioneer within the league who defined African nationalism even before the
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manifesto. According to Qunta, “Lembede defined African nationalism as a scientific ideology which had a philosophical, economic, historical, democratic and ethical basis. He viewed it as a nation building philosophy which seeks to forge a united African nation from a number of nationalities based on his belief that African people are one people” (2018: 3). Qunta notes that in this conception of African nationalism, “the destiny of African people is national freedom and after national freedom there will be socialism. […] the home of African people and has been such from time immemorial. A cardinal principle of African nationalism is that the leaders of African people must come from among themselves. Freedom is the indispensable precondition for all progress and development” (2018: 3). Lembede’s ideas on Africanism and African nationalism, which he used interchangeably, were to be adopted by Youth League, the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania and the Black Consciousness Movement. Lembede and his close friend and intellectual sparring partner, A.P. Mda, read widely and kept abreast on events in other parts of Africa and the world (Qunta, 2018). For Mda, African nationalism is “the militant outlook of a dispossessed people, a people oppressed in their own country on the grounds of their being the rightful owners of the land, on the grounds of their belonging to a group with a particular colour. In short, a group that is nationally oppressed. It is a dynamic nation-building outlook” (Mda, 1948: np).
For a more rigorous excavation of a decolonial theory, it is important to consider the feminist challenge to black consciousness. Mangena notes that, through recognizing that women could be equal to men as public leaders, the black consciousness philosophy “inadvertently and tacitly endorsed the legitimacy of “gender” as an issue in the terrain of social and political power relations between men and women. In this sense the Black Consciousness philosophy was ahead of its time with regard to the problematic of “gender”” (2008: 254). She cites Ramphele who notes that,
“gender as a political issue was not raised at all […] There is no evidence to suggest that the BWF [Black Women’s Federation] was concerned with the special problems women experienced as a result of sexism both in the private and in the public sphere” (In Mangena, 2008: 254). Mangena insists that, although gender was not an organizing principle of the movement, “gender concerns were tacitly endorsed” (2008: 255).
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