Neither Slaves Nor Victims, Neither Innocent Nor Saviors: Black Consciousness and the call to re-define ourselves.

March 31, 2008

THE ANC AS BOLSHEVIKS

“The Workers and Peasants Government has decreed that Kronstadt1 and the rebellious ships must immediately submit to the authority of the Soviet Republic. Therefore I command all who have raised their hand against the Socialist fatherland to lay down their arms at once…Only those surrendering unconditionally may count on the mercy of the Soviet Republic… Simultaneously I am issuing orders to prepare to quell the mutiny and subdue the mutineers by force of arms.”

–Leon Trotsky
Commander-in-Chief of the USSR’s Red Army, 1921

“Already the idea was beginning to emerge among some circles… that the BCM [Black Consciousness Movement] could consolidate itself as, at worst, a political formation to replace the ANC [African National Congress] and, at least, a parallel movement enjoying the same legitimacy as the ANC. It was of primary importance that we should deny our opponents any and both of these possibilities.”

- Oliver Tambo

Oliver Tambo, and the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the ANC, in the spirit of the Bolsheviks, interpreted the Black Consciousness Movement as fundamentally an ‘opponent’ of the ANC – something to be carefully controlled, rather than as an offer. While they did not unleash the wrath which had earlier been directed at the Pan-African Congress (“whose complete collapse would help to limit the possibilities of the counter-revolution”2) their critique of the BCM was utterly tainted by the assumption that it could become a threat to ANC’s monopoly on being a ‘legitimate’ representative of the liberation struggle. This arrogant – almost paranoid – politics was rooted in the unquestioned assumption that the only possible path to ‘liberation’ lay in a vanguard party seizing state power. Within the Bolshevik tradition, the participation of broad sections of the oppressed in attacking the oppressive state and establishing new institutions is not desirable in and of itself, but only on the condition that the rebellious populace is simultaneously subservient to the authority of the vanguard party.

Therefore, Black Consciousness, a politics rooted in black people establishing an autonomous identity, (and the institutions needed to realize such autonomy) is rejected as mere rebellion. Tambo writes that, “the fact that the popular rebellion (of 1976) did not become an insurrection pointed up limitations in Black Consciousness ideology. There had been a lack of political direction to guide the outbreak of collective anger in the townships… Whatever the strengths of the upsurge they lacked a strategy and tactics which could only be found in the leadership of the ANC.”3As a result of the ANC’s insistence on monopolizing the terms of the struggle against apartheid, many important contributions of Black Consciousness have been undermined, eclipsed, and misnamed.

DUAL POWER

“Dual power recognizes that waiting until after the insurrection to participate in libratory political and economic relationships means postponing our liberation; it is as senseless as waiting until after the insurrection to begin reorganizing society…
The great task of grassroots dual power is to seek out and create social spaces and fill them with libratory institutions and relationships. Where there is room for us to act for ourselves, we form institutions conducive not only to catalyzing revolution, but also to the present conditions of a fulfilling life, including economic and political self-management to the greatest degree achievable. We seek not to seize power, but to seize opportunity vis a vis the exercise of our power.”

- Brian Dominick4

    “One must immediately dispel the thought that Black Consciousness is merely a methodology or a means towards an end. What Black Consciousness seeks to do is to produce at the output end of the process real black people who do not see themselves as appendages to white society.”

    - Steve Biko

    Black Consciousness politics spring out of the basic poverty (economic, but principally psychological and social) of black South Africans under apartheid. The assertion is that the brutal strictures of white supremacy create a situation in which black people are not fit to participate as equals within a society that grants dignity to all human beings. According to Steve Biko, “the black man has become a shell, a shadow of a man, completely defeated, drowning in his own misery, a slave, an ox bearing the yoke of oppression with sheepish timidity.” Biko then uses this analysis to example an intriguing paradox. He writes, “This is the first truth, bitter as it may seem, that we have to acknowledge before we can start on any program of changing the status quo… The only vehicle for change are these people who have lost their personality.” By naming blacks as the ‘only vehicle for change,’ Biko therefore names the restoration of dignity to blacks as a necessary pre-condition for revolutionary change in South Africa. Perhaps most importantly, Biko is insisting that black people themselves must “pump back life into his empty shell.”5 Dignity is not something that can be granted from above. The simple transfer of state power to a black political party will not (can not, and has not) address the fundamental hollowing and degradation of black people under white power.

    Mark Sanders’ essay on Black Consciousness6 draws our attention to the stress Biko and other Black Consciousness thinkers put on acknowledging and confronting the ways in which black people are complicit in their own oppression. Biko seeks to “remind (the black man) of his complicity in the crime of allowing himself to be misused and therefore letting evil reign supreme in the country of his birth. This is what we mean by an inward-looking process.” According to Sanders, “assuming responsibility in this way , becoming an agent instead of a victim, is as crucial to Black Consciousness as it was to Karl Marx when, in Capital, he ‘attempted to make the factory workers rethink themselves as agents of production, not as victims of capitalism.’”7 But Biko is taking Marx a step further. He is saying not only that oppressed people are (potentially) agents of their liberation, but also – and necessarily – agents of their own subjugation. It is exactly the acute attention to moments of complicity that gives Black Consciousness its explosive power. Someone that believes they ‘deserve better,’ may well fight for improvements in their life, but ultimately someone ‘else’ is responsible for bringing about that improvement. Someone that knows they are being degraded because they allow themselves to be, protects their dignity not with ‘rights,’ but with resistance, with rage. In Biko’s rather prophetic essay “On Death,” he writes, “If they want to beat me five times, they can only do so on condition that I allow them to beat me five times. If I react sharply, equally and oppositely, to the first clap, they are not going to systematically count the next four claps, you see. It’s a fight… If you allow me to respond, I’m certainly going to respond. And I’m afraid you might have to kill me in the process even if it’s not your intention.”8


    The ANC criticizes what Biko refers to as the ‘inward-looking process’ that Black Consciousness necessarily produces. The NEC policy statement of 1973 states that, “it is in struggle, in the actual physical confrontation with the enemy, that the people gain a lasting confidence in their own strength… it is through action that people acquire true psychological emancipation.” Certainly one cannot regain self-confidence – a sense of inherent worth – merely by thinking about it, or talking about it. White supremacy is a set of tangible, material relations – in addition to ideology – that must be actively dismantled. But it is too narrow a definition of “action” to speak only of direct, physical confrontation with the ‘enemy.’

    For example, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), in Mexico, demonstrates a clear alternative to the Bolshevik/Guerrilla war vision of revolutionary transformation. As an armed force in open rebellion against the Mexican state, the Zapatistas offer protection to communities that would like to declare themselves “autonomous” from the present regime. In order to receive armed protection from the EZLN, a community must build their own institutions to care for the sick, educate the young, administer justice, etc. The ‘bad government,’ which fails to (or flatly refuses to) genuinely meet the needs of oppressed peoples, must be replaced by institutions the people themselves craft. This is a politics of Dual Power. The revolutionary forces, rather than single-mindedly focusing on seizing state power, focus instead on replacing and superseding the state, in the process of actively confronting the reigning order. The Black Consciousness Movement showed signs of moving black South Africans in the direction of a dual power revolution – or, at the very least, further towards a self-governing populace than the vanguardist policies of the ANC could have, or did, produce.

    Far from being ‘rebellious’ – in the sense of being solely destructive, or reactionary, or narrow-minded – the Black Consciousness Movement had that glimmer of tremendous possibility that all insurrections carry. In the moment of insurrection, people who have always been voiceless, mere ‘shells’ of human beings, demonstrate their capacity to govern all the affairs of daily life, and often with a level of cooperation, justice, and even beauty that are not conceivable within the grind of ‘normal’ life. In addition to building separate all-black political organizations, (and thereby asserting the ability, and the ‘right’ of blacks to step away from white liberals) the Black Consciousness Movement also created a number of health clinics and other social institutions to meet the needs of the black community. Had these initiatives been given room to continue – rather than being marginalized by the self-proclaimed vanguard – South Africa after the resignation of the National Party might be in much better shape. Rather than relying on the scant resources and good will of the ANC government, it could be possible that the majority of South Africans would see themselves as the most important factor in ‘reconstruction & development.’

    THE TERMS OF INTEGRATION

    “If they are true liberals they must realize that they themselves are oppressed, and that they must fight for their own freedom and not that of the nebulous ‘they’ with whom they can hardly claim identification.”

    - Steve Biko

    “We shall need to see our efforts not so much as attempts to right wrongs on behalf of the blacks, as to set our society free from the lies on which it is built.”

    - Nadine Gordimer

    Oliver Tambo sees a ‘limitation’ in BCM “describing the entire white population of our country as ‘part of the problem.’”9 In fact, the influence of Black Consciousness on white articulations of struggle and freedom was one of its main contributions. Both the ANC and BCM saw the end goal of liberation struggle as a nonracial society in which those-now-white and those-now-black co-exist on political, social and economic terms of equality and dignity. But there are important differences in the terms of integration, the means by which nonracialism can be achieved. These differences tend to b oversimplified to the point of slander, whereby it is assumed that the ANC treats whites with respect, and Black Consciousness simply attacks and condemns them. This slander – and the related marginalization of BCM ideas – allows for nearly fifteen years of ‘liberation’ in which the broad outlines of white privilege established during and before apartheid remain roughly intact; whites have been integrated into the new democracy without having to significantly confront their own values, nor the plunder of the nation which has allowed them such ‘comfort.’10 Cecil Rhodes is left in his Hitler pose, overlooking the company gardens, and a few blocks away he has been fused together with Nelson Mandela11, as if the two represent roughly equivalent – and benign – worldviews.

    Alternately, Black Consciousness invited whites to reconfigure themselves as neither innocent nor saviors, as neither entitled to their present status nor excluded from human interactions with the black majority of South Africa. SASO, the all-black South African Student Organization formed to avoid the paternalism of the majority white National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) was created, in Biko’s words, “to remove (the white man) from our table, strip the table of all trappings put on it by him, decorate it in true African style, settle down and then invite him to join us on our own terms if he liked.”12 According to Sanders, “this is eventually what happened. By the mid-1980s NUSAS was taking its direction from the black leadership, which had developed since 1976.”13

    In 1972 SPRO-CAS (the Special Program for Christian Action in Society) published a book entitled “White Liberation” in which an acceptance of Black Consciousness politics is the basic starting point for a politics crafted by and for whites. In an essay entitled “the white problem” Clive Nettleton insists that “the changes which black consciousness must inevitably bring will affect whites no less than blacks.” That is to say, Nettleton assumes that black people must, increasingly adopt Black Consciousness as a worldview and methodology and he assumes, then, that the blossoming of confidence amongst blacks will force whites to confront, as Biko puts it, “the one problem which they have, which is one of ’superiority.’”14 Refusing the choices of ignoring or actively suppressing Black Consciousness, Nettleton encourages whites to “try to create a white consciousness… which will enable them to act, rather then react. This would necessitate a change in the meaning of ‘whiteness’ to render possible an eventual meeting of blacks with whites. Domination by whites is the essential feature of such meetings as do at present take place. In a changed consciousness on the part of both blacks and whites lies the only possibility for a just and peaceful solution of the conflict inherent in the present situation.”15 Even if Gordimer, SPRO-CAS and others are on the radical fringe of white society, their attempts to acclimate themselves to the teachings of Black Consciousness speak volumes to the potential of Black Consciousness to influence white society generally.

    Unlike the ANC’s ‘four nation thesis,’16 Black Consciousness rejects wholesale any biological concepts of race, stressing instead the social dynamics of power and privilege that produce ‘white’ and ‘black’ as distinct and antagonistic categories. Furthermore, whereas the post-apartheid policies of ‘reconciliation’ allow whites to be ‘victims’ of ‘human rights violations’ ‘perpetrated’ by the armed struggle17, Black Consciousness demands that both blacks and whites interrogate themselves in terms of their complicity in oppression. In other words, whites are offered integration into a majority black country, but not by assuming that their white identity is static, or natural, and not without being accountable for their ideas and actions which have wreaked havoc on that same majority.

    REJECTING PASSIVITY, REJECTING THE VANGUARD

    “Now we can only generate a response from white society when we as blacks speak with a definite voice and say what we want.”

    - Steve Biko

    In refusing to silently comply with white attempts to erase their humanity, activists in the Black Consciousness movement set off a series of explosions – some subtle, gradual, others unavoidably massive – within South Africa. Despite its rebelliousness, its failure to be easily categorized and the way it squirms its way out of obeying the marching orders of the Bolshevik party, Black Consciousness remains capable of inspiring both blacks and whites to reject passivity and to strive, instead, towards the fundamental human needs of dignity and autonomy.

     

    1 Fighting on the slogan, “All power to the soviets, not the parties,” a broad alliance of anarchists and leftists in Kronstadt rose up in rebellion against the newly formed Bolshevik state. Their rebellion centered around freedom of the press, release of socialist and anarchist prisoners, establishment of communal housing broadly within the city, and principally centering power fully within the hands of the Soviets – workers’, neighborhood, peasant, etc. councils – rather than within the state apparatus. In short, they fought for a broadening of “democracy,” in the sense of self-governance at all levels of society. Trotsky did lead troops to crush the rebellion, to disarm the population, and to dismantle those institutions established by the so-called “mutineers.”

    2 Tambo, O. (1987). Preparing for Power: Oliver Tambo speaks. Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books.

    3 Tambo, O. (1987). Preparing for Power: Oliver Tambo speaks. Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books.

    4 Published online as “An Introduction to Dual Power Strategy.” Can be found at: http://sandiego.indymedia.org/en/2002/09/2403.shtml

    5 Biko, S. (1978). I write what I like. London: Bowerdean.

    6 Included in: Sanders, M. (2002). Complicities: the intellectual and apartheid. Durham: Duke University Press.

    7 Sanders is here quoting Gayatri Spivak.

    8 Biko, S. (1978). I write what I like. London: Bowerdean.

    9 Tambo, O. (1987). Preparing for Power: Oliver Tambo speaks. Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books.

    10 See Grunebaum and Henri: “Where the mountain meets its shadow: a conversation on memory, identity and fragmented belonging” published by the Direct Action Center for Peace & Memory.

    11 “Mandela Rhodes Place” is a five star hotel in the central business district of Cape Town.

    12 Biko, S. (1978). I write what I like. London: Bowerdean.

    13 Sanders, M. (2002). Complicities: the intellectual and apartheid. Durham: Duke University Press.

    14 Biko, S. (1978). I write what I like. London: Bowerdean. I have changed the tense of this quote from past tense to present tense.

     

    15 SPRO-CAS (1972). White Liberation. Johannesburg: Raven Press.

    16 The four nations being the four racial categories established by apartheid: White, Indian, Coloured, and African. Though these were all nominally based in biological notions, apartheid’s ‘racial classification board,’ which every year re-defined the racial status of hundreds of people, proved their own fiction.

    17 Again, see Grunebaum and Henri: “Where the mountain meets its shadow: a conversation on memory, identity and fragmented belonging” published by the Direct Action Center for Peace & Memory.

     

    Posted by tfsparow
    Filed in college writing

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