Black Consciousness: A Critical, Relevant and Liberatory Angle of Vision

Biko defined black consciousness as:

“the realization by the black man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the cause of their oppression - the blackness of their skin and to operate as a group in order to rid themselves of the shackles that bind them to perpetual servitude. It seeks to demonstrate that black is not an aberration from the normal, which is white. It is a manifestation of a new realization that by seeking to run away from themselves and to emulate the white man, blacks are insulting the intelligence of whoever created them black. Black consciousness therefore takes cognizance of the deliberateness of God's plan in creating black people black. It seeks to infuse the black community with a newly found pride in themselves; their effort, their value systems, their cultures, their religion, their outlook of life.”

Now Biko rightly perceived (as many of us have come to understand in time) that his South Africa was a world characterized by unequal power relations among its inhabitants. It was a world of white domination and black subordination. Power relations were marked along racial lines making South Africa a white supremacist society.

It is now a well accepted fact that white supremacy as it found expression in South Africa was not a natural occurrence nor a result of the inherent superiority of the white people but a reality that was brought about through coercion and persuasion. The state apparatus was used to enforce laws and policies that opened up opportunities for white people at the expense of black people. The laws were designed to place a black person at the position of subservience relative to a white person. If I may be blunt, these laws were meant to produce white masters and black servants. To be sure, by and large, these aims were achieved, as we still live in a society where whiteness is associated with privilege and power and blackness with subservience. This reality, is thus a result of coercive measures that were enforced by a white supremacist Apartheid regime.

The white supremacist Apartheid system did not only resort to coercion to enforce racial inequalities but also to persuasion. It was, arguably, Biko, more than any other thinker and activist before who diagnosed this element in the system. The diagnosis is captured by one of his most celebrated and equally hated remarks:

“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”

This remark, suggests that to Biko, domination was not just a matter of laws and policies, but also operated at the realm of ideas, beliefs, values, aesthetics and so on. In South Africa, persuasion, or what you may call ideological domination, was advanced through historical literature, fiction and all other forms of literature you find in institutions of learning whose content was, and still is; dominated by Europe and its achievements and capturing Africa only as an appendage, sending the message to a black learner that the only past that matters is that of a white person. White supremacy was, and still is, reinforced by the Christian religion that represents African religious beliefs and practices as demonic and that associates them with Europe's past pagan practices, sending the message to an innocent black congregant that Africa and the black person in particular is still at the bottom of the ladder of evolution. Furthermore, White supremacy was, and still is, reinforced at the realm of the arts. The white supremacist world still speaks of black artistic products steeped in an African tradition as “valuable” traditional artifacts evoking fascination and wonder, suggesting that indigenous work can never achieve the “art” status attributed to work produced in the tradition of Europe. What about the white person’s language as the language of opportunity, privilege, and status? Ask the black middle class why they put so much pressure on their children to achieve fluency in a white person’s language.

All these factors have historically conspired to send the message that blackness is inferior to whiteness and that in order for one to achieve a better life one has to reject everything in the tradition of her ancestors and place herself firmly in the tradition of Europe.

Where the liberal sense of freedom is defined in terms of freedom to participate in institutions and structures; as in being a student in a university, if you so wish, and studying a course of your choice, Biko’s notion of freedom is more radical and substantive. It challenges us to go beyond issues of access and participation in a conventional sense, as of being students and learning or being lecturers and lecturing. It challenges us to think ontologically and enquire: "what" is the nature of the reality/knowledge we are meant to "access" and "participate" in? We are also challenged to think epistemologically and probe: how do we come to know and accept that reality/knowledge as valid? Black consciounsness, furthermore, challenges us to grapple with the question of power; who defines the reality/knowledge presented to us and according to whose terms are we supposed to access and participate in that reality? Thus, it is not just about whose learning and whose lecturing in the university; it is also about whose knowledge, whose values, whose traditions, whose ideas, whose mythologies, whose experiences are captured in the prescribed reading and the recommended text as well as in the broader curriculum.

There is a growing awareness that what passes for knowledge is, for the most part, legitimated by power. Knowledge doesn’t legitimate itself. The knowledge that has passed for superior knowledge in South Africa has historically been legitimated by colonial powers. This knowledge has, in turn been used to determine and test what is accepted and what is acceptable in institutions of higher learning. Through these processes of testing and determining the acceptability of knowledge claims, intellectual traditions from the margins dominated by blackness have been marginalized. It is these realities that Biko was critical of when he said that Black Consciousness:

“seeks to demonstrate that black is not an aberration from the normal, which is white”

Thus to Biko, freedom starts with the realization; that angle of vision: that black is not an aberration to whiteness. From a Black Consciousness perspective, a liberatory experience is not constituted by the instance of merely being a student in Wits University and gaining access to the eurocentric canons and knowledge systems that, as a precondition, requires you to push aside everything you have learnt from your experiences, sages and acclaimed authorities in your community and start afresh on a clean slate by studying Marx, Hegel, Kant and the eurocentric list goes on and on.

Black Consciousness provides one with an angle of vision; that realization that the knowledge we receive is not universal but is steeped in specific traditions. It enables us to call into question the dichotomies between academic and non-academic ways of knowing, between universal and local knowledge, between expert and non-expert ways of knowing. It offers us opportunities to consider historically black spaces as legitimate sites for knowledge production. It enables us to value African intellectual traditions (in that I include values, mythologies, beliefs, idea and so on). Black Consciousness further enables us to attach value to African traditions, historically interrupted and disrupted by the colonial machinery. We can now see the tradition of the elders as very important for our survival as the black people and the survival of the human species. We can now boldly say that for clarity of understanding within the African context, you need to place your ideas within particular African knowledge traditions. These traditions start to become an important angle of reference for us. The challenge that Black Consciousness further poses for those who dare to be conscious is that of weaving up all the broken pieces and fragments in the disrupted black people’s traditions into coherent discourses that can liberate how we, black people, firstly think about ourselves and about the broader reality. This resonates with what Biko’s remark:

“Black Consciousness… seeks to infuse the black community with a newly found pride in themselves; their effort, their value systems, their cultures, their religion, their outlook of life.”

It must be said that this is not about going back to a primordial past or a golden age but more than anything about affirming our heritage (in the process, affirming ourselves); the importance of heritage being something that is universally accepted. This should also ultimately liberate conceptions of reality and systems of knowledge that, up to so far, have been impoverished by the marginalization of African intellectual traditions.

It was these realities that Biko was responding to when he campaigned for self definition. Thus to Biko, defining oneself as a black person is an act of resistance. It's an attempt to resist external oppressive notions and definitions of black people that were advanced by the white supremacist powers. It is also about agency, the agency to create rather than be created. It is only through her agency, when a black person has become a subject in history that a true synthesis can be achieved. In a world of Black Consciousness, we are not exotic objects of white men’s fascination, but people with a sense of past, a sense of history and a substantial sense of self.

The issues raised shouldn’t be taken to suggest that no gains have been achieved so far in the struggle for socio-political change in South Africa, certainly, the laws of the country have changed and a black person can live and study where she wishes if she can afford it. Nonetheless, the black person is still not a subject and thus, in a post Apartheid South Africa, a black person still hasn’t achieved substantive freedom. In “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” Freire, the Brazilian educationalist warns us:

“We cannot enter the struggle as objects in order to later become subjects”

This quotation captures Biko’s emphasis on the primacy of ideological freedom in capsule form. And there lies the power of black consciousness; in the realization that true freedom lies in a black person being a subject in history rather an object. And this is not just a matter of laws and policies but A Frame of Mind, and An Angle of Vision.