The Law and the Prophets

Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968–1977

Daniel Magaziner

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780821443309
• Topic: Diritto
• Subtopic: Storia giuridica

"No nation can win a battle without faith, " Steve Biko wrote, and as Daniel R. Magaziner demonstrates in The Law and the Prophets, the combination of ideological and theological exploration proved a potent force.

The 1970s are a decade virtually lost to South African historiography. This span of years bridged the banning and exile of the country's best-known antiapartheid leaders in the early 1960s and the furious protests that erupted after the Soweto uprisings of June 16, 1976. Scholars thus know that something happened—yet they have only recently begun to explore how and why.

The Law and the Prophets is an intellectual history of the resistance movement between 1968 and 1977; it follows the formation, early trials, and ultimate dissolution of the Black Consciousness movement. It differs from previous antiapartheid historiography, however, in that it focuses more on ideas than on people and organizations. Its singular contribution is an exploration of the theological turn that South African politics took during this time. Magaziner argues that only by understanding how ideas about race, faith, and selfhood developed and were transformed in this period might we begin to understand the dramatic changes that took place.

PART I

Making Black Consciousness

When Steve Biko assumed the presidency of SASO in 1969, he was twenty-two years old. Born in 1946, he later wrote that he had “lived all my conscious life in the framework of institutionalized separate development.” Apartheid had been a constant: “My friendships, my love, my thinking and every other facet of my life have been carved and shaped within the context of separate development.”¹ Part 1 explores the ramifications and effects of this fact—or at least the perception that this was the case—on the generation of students and activists who made Black Consciousness.

Chapter 1 better situates this process within larger historical narratives, first in terms of the mechanics of 1960s politics and education and then, following the lead of Rob Nixon and others, within the more particular narrative of black South African thought under apartheid.² Finally, it considers the immediate impact of these years on the first generation of student activists, through their experiences of both apartheid and the education system. Most contend that they came of age during a lull in antiapartheid politics, but as we shall see, it was more a period of reassessment rather than a full stop. That being said, black politics did more or less yield the stage during the 1960s, and an array of ostensibly multiracial liberal groups came to the fore. Chapter 2 recounts how nascent black student organizations began to challenge the liberal ascendancy and thereby opened the space for the more fundamental critique that became Black Consciousness. The chapter continues by showing how, in their interpretations of this break, SASO activists began a new process of self-identification, as men and responsible adults.

Chapter 3 covers the period between 1968 and 1972, during which Biko and other activists founded SASO and began to explore what the organization was for. To that end, they considered fundamental categories of identification—notably race—and developed a political philosophy that called for neither liberation nor power but consciousness. Thus, between 1968 and 1972, political practice was not a matter of protest, of public struggle, of slogans and trials. Rather, as Biko’s colleague Strini Moodley wrote near the end of these four years, it was about the “projection of the beingness.”³ Read this way, Black Consciousness offered a unique sort of politics; it was not something you did or believed, it was something you were.

1

Sophiatown after the Fall

The Sixties

A SMALL, undistinguished house sits at 111 Ray Street, near Johannesburg. In its ordinariness, it offers mute testimony to failure. This area is the suburb known once again as Sophiatown—“once again” because only recently has this suburb regained its birth name. For generations, the neighborhood was known as Triomf—from the Afrikaans word meaning “triumph”—a name linked to its history. As Sophiatown, the neighborhood was founded in the early twentieth century as a “freehold” township, and it had been one of Johannesburg’s only multiracial and relatively free spaces. The so-called triumph was the apartheid state’s destruction of this space by the end of the 1950s; as apartheid dictated, Sophiatown’s inhabitants were separated according to racial groups, with their neighborhood bulldozed and Triomf erected in its place.

Which brings us to the small house with its attached garage and neat fence of black spikes. It hearkens back to a well-remembered part of both Sophiatown’s and South Africa’s history, where Drum writers held forth with Can Themba at his famed House of Truth. In the years since the neighborhood’s destruction, Themba’s home has figured prominently in the writing of historians, memoirists, writers of fiction, and others who have memorialized and lamented the rise and fall of the “Sophiatown Renaissance” during the 1950s. Themba is a wonderful character, and the renaissance makes for lively stories.¹ But the problem of its end looms. The building at 111 Ray is no longer the House of Truth, nor is the rechristened but still predominantly Afrikaans Triomf truly Sophiatown. The black spot’s residents failed to stop the destruction of their homes, just as in Sharpeville’s wake, it was apparent that the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) and the African National Congress (ANC) had failed to stop apartheid.

Sophiatown was a rallying point for antiapartheid agitation during the 1950s, but in the end, rallies and protests achieved little—a momentary release, author and Sophiatown resident Bloke Modisane remembered, “that left us exhausted and limp.”² By 1960, the ANC and PAC were banned; by 1964, their leaders were imprisoned or in exile and the struggle, it seemed, had stilled. The university students of 1968 were teenagers in 1960. Some counted political activists among their family members; others had grown up in Sophiatown and similar places and remembered with anger the removals, police raids, disillusionment, and frustration that marked its final days. Sophiatown after the fall is the critical intellectual context for understanding what the pre-1968 failures meant to those students who sought to begin again in the years that followed. The state’s triumph was black South Africa’s defeat; the failure to save Sophiatown and similar places—and the helplessness that defeat engendered—was the context in which the Black Consciousness generation formed its political and mental consciousness. In this chapter, I first set the political and institutional context in which Black Consciousness developed, and then I consider the less overt but perhaps more resonant memories and experiences that students took with them to the university.

LIBERAL POLITICS AND GRAND APARTHEID

In the wake of the 1960 bannings and subsequent imprisonment or exile of African political leaders, black voices more or less ceded the mantle of opposition to self-described liberal political groups that plotted multiracial reform against white exclusiveness. Embodied by Alan Paton’s short-lived Liberal Party and the National Union of South African Students, liberals agitated against the moral bankruptcy of the apartheid regime and called for “nonwhites” to be integrated into the (white-dominated) political and economic system. Liberal politics, however, failed to slow apartheid’s further development during the 1960s. Instead, Sophiatown, Sharpeville, and subsequent defeats cleared the stage for Grand Apartheid—Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd’s master plan for the final and total separation of the country’s peoples. Sophiatown’s demolition was only one famous example among thousands of similar actions. All told, hundreds of thousands of people fell victim to the Department of Bantu Administration’s planning during the 1960s, and by that decade’s close, the apartheid idea reigned. The government moved ahead with plans for Bantustan independence, after which South Africa was to be not one country but many—one rich, powerful white republic ringed by black, poor, and ostensibly independent nations.³

The government similarly restructured other areas of South African life, especially the education system. In order to redefine “appropriate” education for Africans and other nonwhites, the National Party effectively transformed instruction at the primary and secondary levels. The Department of Bantu Education seized control of African education from the country’s many missions, and at the tertiary level, the government introduced the Expansion of University Education Act in 1959.⁴ This act had three major functions. First, it made it illegal for nonwhite students to attend white universities such as the University of Cape Town (UCT). Second, it gave the government control of the University of Fort Hare—the Africans-only, mission-run university at which leaders such as Robert Sobukwe and Nelson Mandela had been educated—and reserved it for Xhosa–speakers. And third, the act established four ethnically divided universities, in keeping with its policy of “separate development” both between white and black and within the nonwhite community: the University of the North (Turfloop) for those speaking Sotho-Tswana and other Transvaal languages, the University of Zululand for Zulus, the University of Durban–Westville for Indians, and the University of the Western Cape for Coloureds.⁵ Finally, the act increased government control over education by empowering the state to set the university curricula and the minister of Bantu administration to appoint administrators. True to its name in some sense, the act did increase especially African enrollment in universities: from 811 in 1961 to 4,601 in 1970.⁶

Yet whites still dominated the student scene. The 4,600 African students plus about 4,000 Coloureds and Indians were but a fraction of the 46,000 white students spread among the English- and Afrikaans-speaking universities. Moreover, even though the number of white students represented only a very small percentage of South Africa’s 3.7 million whites, inclusive nonwhite numbers were an infinitesimal one-third of 1 percent of the total nonwhite population of over 18 million.⁷ Given these demographics, many black tertiary students joined the National Union of South African Students, just as many black political leaders joined the Liberal Party. This organization’s liberal credentials were well established. NUSAS’s leadership aspired to political influence and courted the government’s displeasure (and sometimes repression) by organizing protests for academic freedom and inviting politically conscious speakers to South Africa. (For instance, New York senator Robert F. Kennedy visited South Africa at NUSAS’s invitation.)⁸

Despite these liberal pretenses, however, NUSAS’s leadership reflected the realities of South Africa’s student population. The NUSAS executive remained white during the 1960s—only twelve nonwhites served on the NUSAS board through 1967, compared to fifty-four whites, and only whites had served as the organization’s president or vice president. Although it reflected the demographics of the universities, the racial makeup of NUSAS was politically problematic for an organization that was among the most overt opponents to the state and claimed a mandate not only from the schools, where whites were in the majority, but also from the general population, where they most decidedly were not.⁹ This situation created conflicts once black students discovered their voice.

The tenor of that voice, however, was in question. Apartheid put students and other aspirant intellectuals in a bind. Consider the aforementioned Can Themba. Themba reputedly boasted that he knew no African language, and in his writing, he flourished his mastery of English like a rapier. One might doubt the former claim, but the intent is telling. The “African Bourgeoisie” was well established by the 1950s.¹⁰ These individuals were the descendants of nineteenth-century converts—teachers, ministers, lawyers, and clerks, many of them university educated, and testaments, in a sense, to the oft-ridiculed British “civilizing mission.” Apartheid fell on them with a particular harshness. Denied citizenship in the modern state, they were instead categorized as “natives,” “Bantus,” or “nonwhites.” Like the rest of African society, they were to be denied visions of the “the green pastures of European society in which [the native] is not allowed to graze.”¹¹ To compound matters, people such as Themba and Modisane fared little better in subaltern discourse, where their urban manners, English language, and aspirations marked them as “situations,” condemned to be forever out of place. As Themba lamented when he stood on the cusp of exile and was faced with Sophiatown’s destruction, intractable political conflict, and no hope for the future, “The dilemma is so complete! . . . What can I do?”¹² For students forced to train at “bush colleges” and seemingly destined to staff Bantustan bureaucracies, the dilemma was complete indeed.¹³ Given this state of affairs, it was not surprising that writers such as Modisane and Themba—particularly the former—obsessively chronicled their own emasculation and infantilization under the apartheid system.¹⁴ They formed their senses of self through their legal and material circumstances, as the law’s classification of, and control over, their bodies was accompanied by frustration, hopelessness, and ultimately submission, whether to alcohol (in Themba’s case) or flight to an uneasy exile (for Modisane).

By the late 1960s, however, a new generation of black thinkers had learned from their elders’ missteps and insisted that their minds would not be classified, nor their bodies labeled. In the 1950s, Modisane had only halfheartedly participated in protests; they offered no more than a momentary release, he reflected, before the overwhelming sense of futility returned. Black Consciousness inverted this; rebellion in fact and in theory would not feel futile because it was an essential and internal part of an individual’s sense of self. By thinking of themselves in new ways, students argued that they could create something new: they would no longer be bodies to submit and be controlled but subjects conscious of, and with faith in, themselves as beings who would rebel.¹⁵

APARTHEID BABIES

Before considering where student thought ended up, we must first consider what black students took with them to the university. Like students everywhere, they arrived at their segregated universities with more than book...