Black Consciousness Movement Research Papers (original) (raw)

Every society, every culture, every group of people who recognize themselves as a collective, have theories about the world and what their place is in that world. This essay is going to explore the effects of systematic oppression, the impact thereof on social, economic, political, and psychological on individuals as well as marginalized communities with specific references to South Africa (SA) and the United States (US).

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- Discursive Social Psychology, South Africa, Black men studies, Black Consciousness Movement

Black Consciousness (BC) poetry in 1970s and 1980s South Africa has been largely acclaimed as an excellent articulation of black subjectivity in the face of apartheid oppression. Despite its emancipatory longings, however, this poetry failed to construct an empowering black identity for both men and women. This article argues that BC poetry's modern black selfhood is wrought by internal contradictions, depending conceptually on the suppression of women's agency and their participation in the liberated nation. It is suggested that BC masculinity, defined by social and sexual conservatism, can today be seen reflected in the masculinities performed by some current ANC leaders.

This article provides a case study of the relationship between performance and power in social movements. It reveals how movements are able to reiterate established cultures of resistance across time and space through performative means. It also shows how – given requisite stage settings and skilful actors – methods of performance allow movements to subvert established structures of domination to their political advantage. It does this through focussing on Steve Biko's role as a defence witness in an apartheid-era political trial of leaders of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM). It demonstrates how, within the courtroom setting, Biko and the defendants improvised upon various pre-established codes, scripts, and dramatic techniques, augmenting the likelihood that their performances would resonate successfully with their audiences. In addition, it shows how Biko and the defendants used social performance to subvert many of apartheid's established culture structures, enabling them not only to explicitly articulate the principles of BC philosophy, but also to implicitly embody and act them out.

It is poignant to note that after the official South African Truth and Reconciliation hearings discontinued there has not been adequate progress made in terms of racial and ethnic reconciliation in South Africa. Therefore, the chapter aims to address the issue with a focus on the contribution that Steve Biko made from his perspectives on a Black Consciousness ideology and how it can be used to address the matter. The chapter commences with stating the problem of racial and ethnic reconciliation in South Africa, that is still a challenge, and has often been observed in media spats between coloured and African blacks. The chapter uses this ethnic and racial tension as a case study to explore how the work of Biko can complement the discontinued work of the SouthAfrican TRC’s process in ensuring racial and ethnic reconciliation.

This article addresses the contentious issue of the relation between emancipatory politics and identity- based forms of politics, especially in a colonialist context. More specifically, the stance toward identity politics of radical contemporary philosopher Jacques Rancière will be examined in relation to the politics of South Africa’s Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), as expounded in the writings of Steve Biko. The article first tracks Rancière’s key articulations of his views on identity politics throughout his work, noting a movement from a rather dismissive treatment to a more nuanced and conditional stance. Second, some of the main challenges and trouble spots in conceptualising and appreciating the key components of the BCM within Rancière’s theory of emancipatory politics are considered. While being found to be limited in properly acknowledging the BCM’s empowering, therapeutic functions and nationalist tendencies, Rancière’s conceptual framework is shown to be more productive in accounting for the complex ways in which both the assertion and denial of black identity have played a key role in the BCM’s politics.

The Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa (URCSA) has since its inception always celebrated its prophetic and missional heritage from all the avenues of the black church. However, it remains crucial to reflect whether this can be ascribed only to a few individuals and whether the struggle against injustice was nurtured on "grassroots" level. The black churches in their own right have certainly made significant contributions during the apartheid years. However, the impact of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) on the black wing of the church, in terms of its mission thought and practice, will still be felt by the newly established church (URCSA) for some years to come. Therefore, this contribution focuses specifically on the mission praxis that has been apparent in the DRC in the Cape since 1652, but it will also subsequently discuss various historical developments in terms of mission thought and practice within the DRC family until 1994 and beyond-the 25 years since the existence of URCSA. The article will provide a fragmentary historical account aimed at presenting an idea of the thought and practice of mission before and after the establishment of URCSA. This paper argues-as part of a critical reflection on the said period-that URCSA should position itself in such a way that it does not perpetuate the patterns of mission thought and practice of the past. It would be crucial for the church to avoid the objectification of mission, as well as being too comfortable to focus on forming external partnerships, without tenaciously and intentionally establishing a praxis of African "missional consciousness" in URCSA.

- by Eugene Baron
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- African Studies, Missional Ecclesiology, Missional Church, Black Consciousness

Dies ist ein Profil, das ich über Selby Semela (1958-2018) geschrieben habe, eine wichtige schwarze libertäre sozialistische Aktivistin, die während des dramatischen landesweiten Aufstands im Juni 1976 in Südafrika eine Führungsrolle innehatte. Es wurde in dem Buch Die großen Streiks: Episoden aus dem Klassenkampf, Holger Marcks & Matthias Sieffert, Herausgeber, Unrast, Münster, Deutschland, Mai 2008 veröffentlicht. Ich hatte versucht, Semela zu erreichen, bevor das Stück veröffentlicht wurde, aber wir konnten keine Verbindung herstellen. Sein Nachruf auf die Baltimore Sun ist hier: https://www.baltimoresun.com/obituaries/bs-md-selby-semela-apartheid-20180902-story.html

- by Michael Schmidt
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- African History, Apartheid, Black History, Anti-Apartheid Movement

This paper explores Keorapetse Kgositsile’s re-ordering of time through his coined concepts of “NOW,” “future memory,” and the “coil of time” in his poetry. In his reckoning, colonial modernity’s time imposed a temporal order that is not congruent with his African worldview
and understanding of time and space. Further, being of South African descent and living in the diaspora meant occupying two realities concurrently. Being informed by southern Africa’s indigenous oral archive and knowledge system in a different milieu necessitated a
creative re-invention of those concepts in his poetic. I draw from theories of animism and the animist unconscious to show how Kgositsile deconstructs modernity’s linear time, with its attendant Cartesian divide between “I and the world,” and show how he absorbs this divide within mythical and magical matrices to re-enchant modernity’s temporality and elevate his worldview. As such, this paper shows how the relationships between modernity and tradition,
memory and desire, past and future, home and exile, and Africa and its diaspora are powerfully synthesised in a manner that necessitates imperative recalibrations of temporality as we understand it within the context of colonial modernity.