I should start with bringing your attention to the fact that I am responding as an individual, and not as a group. But do not despair, I respond as a member of the group, organically linked to its working and, if that is not arrogance, entitled to speaking from a\my perspective within it.
Then I should further alert you to the fact that I am a structuralist: contents are shaped and thereby delimited by structural considerations and concerns. The content is, of course, important, indeed it is the content that enables people to be unique and a one, but all of that content is given articulation by a dominant structure. It means then that, as a strategy, I argue at a structural level, framing my response within what I deem appropriate boundaries. It has the unfortunate side effect of portraying me as a fatuous sophist, interested in rhetoric, or less graciously put, interested only in the sound of my own voice. If so, I apologise in advance, and beg a tolerant reading of me.
The Black Consciousness Collective is, as you have correctly pointed out, about Black Consciousness. But, as I hope is self evident, BC is the object of our coming together. As a concept then, I suggest, it is mute and seeks, as with Biko and his contemporaries so with us, an animator. It seeks, in a word reminiscent of an ideology that shamelessly pulled from the supernatural to cow the illiterate and weak into submission, to be quickened. In us, very specifically the working committee of the BCC, but also, to our eternal delight, those who respond to the call we issue regularly, it found Subjects willing to impregnate it with the seed of present day black aspirations. I suggest, Andile, that the real player here, and the frame within which questions should be articulated, is non other than the Collective. It is, as I sense you suggest in your writing, the players that make the BC. Hence, for example, your categories of different players that constitute, broadly speaking, present day Black Consciousness.
I also suggest that BC is yet a concept that needs elevation to the level of structure. I suspect that this distinction, between concept and structure, will need a separate argument all of its own to make sense. I cannot pursue that here though and ask, yet again, an indulgence in this matter for the sake of this argument.
The player, though, should be dialectically understood, no? All during the unchallenged hegemony of formal logic thinking patterns could not deal with contradictions. In its nature, formal logic could only deal with clear and unambiguous boundaries, necessitating the need for exclusions. Dialectics, originally advanced in the form of questions to break down established ideological (in the Marxist sense) certitudes, evolved (mutated is the word I would use) to a point where it could hold contradictions. In its earlier state, before Hegel and the not so benevolent intervention of Marx, the dialectic appeared as a question. Questions are silent about the nature of answers, and can comfortably reach eternal age without answers. Contrary to the formal logician’s construction of the relationship between questions and answers, chronologically articulated as cause and effect, questions demand no necessary relationship with and to answers.
And so, rather fatuously, we reach a point where I can state a thesis and defend it. Hopefully.
There is no practise without theory. I do not simply mean that whenever you find practise you also find theory, but that without theory there cannot exist practise. The fuddled and generally inchoate pronouncements half heard from populist Preachers masquerading as Politicians, and howled at full throttle by many Followers, do not qualify as theory. Yet, and this we know from our own pathetic situation, practise is not necessary to yoke people together in a common nonsense cause. We know from our own experiences that people can be yoked together for the sole purpose of gorging themselves like pigs at the trough, and about the same amount of thinking as pigs is required to fill the belly with pig food.
Further, and this is something you hint at first, Andile, people can hide this piggish behaviour behind the guise of practise. They can do this because practise is within the realm of the real, and the real is not but constantly becoming. So those in power can produce substandard realities, and we, trapped within realities because we are already always produced, continue to seek reprieve in that matrix. This unfortunate circumstance can only be effectively fought at the realm of Ideas. At this level, the level of ideas, people can effectively stop the production of certain realities, and certainly substandard realities.
The Girl From Khutsong, without theory, will continue to fail to produce reality. Though I understand and sympathise with Girl From Khutsong’s plight, for it is my plight and that of people I hold dear, I do not make the mistake of apprehending what she does as practise. Her anger is qualitatively no different from that of a hurricane; you need only wait for it to blow over. And though the hurricane is frightening in its anger, and we are happy to accept that that anger is many times brought on by our alienated from nature pursuits, we therefore also know that the solution lies with us, and not the hurricane. See this, Andile? Constantly and continuously, the oppressed seek salvation from the oppressor. Even when they seem to be fighting those in power, the oppressed, like the hurricane, remain the creation of the oppressor.
Black Consciousness is yet an Idea, still at its conceptual stage. In this regard Biko, and the early Black Consciousness adherents, provide us with material with which to build a structure. The structure that is being built is geared towards a black world where every content, be it material or immaterial substances, will be structured by that black world. Structures, though, are considerably more than Ideas, even if those ideas form the basis, indeed are the material, of the structure. To move, in the ultimate liberation struggle, from ideas to structure will call for first immersion in and then above average (am I quoting the President’s mother?) skill in wielding those ideas. Immersion in ideas will always be a struggle. But immersion in ideas that are against the very being that you are produced to be will take sacrifice to dwarf that of the cross hanged man. To immerse yourself and then get to be above average in the wielding of those selfsame ideas will take many lifetimes. It is not the stone against the Casper that can be imported to posterity; it is the idea of it that will be handed down. The best we can do, even as we live dangerously and actually take up stones to throw at the Casper, is to refine those ideas. Those ideas refined create ideology. Ideology, understood simply as ideas related to each other in a particular way, and not as a systematic deceiver in the Marxist sense, becomes theory when we can translate ideology into phenomenon. That whole process, seen from beginning to end, constitute structure. Obviously this is abstract, and I would have to give an actual example i.e. capture the relations between ideas as relations between concrete visible matter. Again, this will need a separate paper.
The material that aboBiko provide us with is necessary, but far from sufficient. It is, I submit, a thing that both he and his contemporaries understood, though, unfortunately, some of his contemporaries have been overtaken by linear time, and the material world. We get to another part of this paper then: the dialectic and the holding of contradictions.
Let us start with what I consider a basic component of Black Consciousness: a black skin. Consciousness, as in Black Consciousness, will have to be embodied in a body that has a black skin. It is then the efforts of these black skinned people that must bring about the structure alluded to above. The first step is to allow all black skinned people to have a space for their views. In this space, that start with the basic fact of the black skin, holding contradictory views should not be a basis for exclusion. The Collective, even though they may hold different conceptions of BC, must give themselves over to that common cause.
It is within that space that we can synthesize, and it is also within that space that substandard realities can be exposed for what they are. In my construction, where theory precedes practise, death at the theoretical stage is enough to stop the emergence of piggish realities. If one’s position cannot be articulated, and one holds it still, then that one is perverse. Can we not deal with perversity?
Mbongisi Dyantyi
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