When it comes to the importance – and the denial – of Black Consciousness, the truth will forever be trampled on, writes Kenosi Mosalakae
Recently the media featured the 50-year anniversary of Hendrik Verwoerd’s assassination in 1966 while completely ignoring the 29th anniversary of Steve Biko’s death or the Steve Biko Memorial Lecture held in commemoration at Unisa last Friday.
It is ironic because the real ideological antagonists in South Africa were in fact Biko and Verwoerd.
While Verwoerd preached the inferiority of African people (he called them “Bantu”) and used the power at his disposal to actualise his opinion of them, Biko generated the Black Consciousness philosophy. This was an antidote to the Verwoerd dogma and also initiated black people’s community programmes to pump life into the "empty shell" that Africans had become as a result of years of oppression perfected by Verwoerd in that period.
Biko did this with not as much power or resources as were available to Verwoerd.
While Verwoerd died content that any revolutionary attempt from "the Bantu" had been crushed, the Rivonia Trial having been concluded two years before with all the “terrorists” sentenced to life imprisonment, Biko’s death triggered the dismantling of Verwoerd’s Afrophobic legal architecture.
From 1978 "petty apartheid" was dismantled, and South Africa saw the opening of white universities – and eventually white schools – to black people.
This was in addition to the opening of restaurants and theatres.
Black people were allowed to form trade unions and have businesses in city centres, and the permanence of Africans in urban areas was recognised with 99-year leasehold rights. Hence, we saw the arrival of townships like Pimville and Diepkloof Extension.
The constitution was changed to allow the Tricameral Parliament in 1983 which gave coloureds and Indians permission to grace the unholy apartheid corridors of power.
It is not far-fetched to conclude that the National Party was no longer on an apartheid agenda at the end of the ’70s as it chanted “adapt or die” in contrast to “ op ’n k***** se kop” (on a k*****'s head) of the ’40s and ’50s.
When you read Niel Barnard’s book Secret Revolution you realise that in the ’80s the apartheid regime was occupied with finding a credible character among Africans that would make an authentic settlement possible, but one that would maintain the status quo.
Of course they also had to smash the cohesion among black people that was made possible by Black Consciousness.
BJ Vorster succeeded Verwoerd on the strength of his record in quashing the "communist threat" as justice minister under Verwoerd, and 12 years of Vorster’s rule did not “simply intensify the repressive state apparatus inaugurated by Verwoerd”. Black people were not just passive recipients of repression.
Biko began his crusade two years after Verwoerd’s death. and the agenda for total liberation (psychologically and otherwise) caught up incrementally in black society. Nothing so illustrates the containment of fear in the black community as the staging of a rally in Durban to celebrate the liberation of Mozambique in 1974.
The Viva Frelimo rallies were central, and the arrest of the South African Students' Organisation/Black People's Convention organisers led to the biggest political trial after the Rivonia Trial.
The effect of Biko’s influence on high school pupils culminated in the 1976 uprisings. His arrest, torture and assassination were part of the efforts by the apartheid regime to silence Black Consciousness.
Then his death triggered international outrage, which led to massive sanctions against the apartheid regime.
Yet, while Verwoerd’s damage may still be apparent, it is not only out of his own doing. It is also a result of a concerted effort by black people themselves in the mid-1980s, backed by white finance and in pursuit of what they called non-racism and human rights, in setting out to demonise Black Consciousness. They seemed unconscious of the fact that BC was an effort to rid black people of the debilitating psychological consequences of years of being downtrodden.
All that this anti-BC crowd discerned was that black people had been deprived of their human rights and the solution was to give them back "their" human rights.
But in practice this meant black people were being allowed participation in a world designed by white people on the basis of white culture while they were extremely ill-equipped for such an environment.
This was not only in terms of a lack of education but in the poverty that spelt dependence on well-resourced whites. Such black people were fertile ground for the National Party to embark on its own format of reform.
With the backing of such black people, the Nationalists (supported by British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and US president Ronald Reagan) were able to work out a settlement concluded in 1994 that entrenched the position of whites, but had no framework for the development of African people.
Remember, the efforts by the Black Consciousness formations to include all black people in the development of the constitution through taking a referendum to endorse the manner in which it should unfold, was rejected in the pre-1994 period. Whites had taken part in their own referendum at the end of the 1980s, and mandated FW de Klerk to go ahead with his reforms.
Had Black Consciousness been sustained as the dominant source of reference and incorporated into education, 22 years would have been more than sufficient to have placed black people on a path that would have shamed Verwoerd. And the media would have remembered Biko’s impact, the effect of his death and the date thereof.
Of course the lapse of memory is part of the sustained effort to obliterate African effort at self-actualisation.
It seems only those aspiring, theoretically I must say, for human rights in a non-racial, non-sexist racist, equal society made up of unequals, get to be featured in history that has been better publicised.
The truth will forever be trampled upon.
* Dr Kenosi Mosalakae is a reader from Houghton