Claims that Steve Biko intended uniting the Black Consciousness movement with the ANC are misguided or opportunistic, writes Malesela Steve Lebelo.
The 40th anniversary of Steve Biko’s death is foreshadowed by a sudden and frenetic determination to re-imagine his philosophy and to place it at the centre of public intellectual discourse.
Leading this renewed interest in Biko’s Black Consciousness (BC) philosophy is an emerging generation of scholars in search of a black radical tradition to counter enduring racism. They are undermined by claims Biko was keen on uniting with the ANC.
Historically, the ANC was never a black radical formation. It is inconceivable that Biko was oblivious to the ANC’s opacity to black radicalism. If Biko intended uniting as some analysts claim, then he would have been naïve or simply outgrown by the BC philosophy he originated and the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) he inspired.
Just as there are Marxists more Marxist than Karl Marx, it is conceivable that there may have been BC thinkers and activists more BC than Biko.
The claim that Biko considered unity with the ANC is not new. It stems from the belief that the Congress tradition represented a higher form of understanding the complexities of racism, capital accumulation and labour exploitation. According to this orthodoxy, Biko’s failure to integrate this complex explanation in his explication of BC philosophy is proof of his and BCM’s naïveté about the complexities of South African society. Biko was not a shallow, unimaginative political activist driven by bravado.
Latest excavations of his work and political impact assert that he was also a philosopher. In conceptualising race as the decisive antagonism to the chagrin of those in the Congress tradition, Biko proved his mettle as a dyed in the wool black radical with a profound philosophical insight.
He would have been acutely aware of the unbridgeable chasm between the black exclusivism of BC he espoused and the non-racialism of the Freedom Charter hanging like an albatross around the ANC’s neck.
For the outrageous claim Biko was keen on the ANC, some of these analysts rely on a 1972 interview with historian Gail Gerhard, done as part of her doctoral thesis deceptively titled “Black Power in South Africa”. Funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, who can be faulted for concluding that Gerhard’s study approaches BC and the entire black radical tradition as pathology.
According to her, the Congress tradition is pragmatic and a reflection of political maturity. Pan-Africanism and BC on the other hand are irrational and ideological. This criticism of Biko’s BC was refined by an emerging discourse that was steeped in Western Marxist-Leninist paradigm in both real political engagement and in academe.
Yet in the interview, contrary to these claims, Biko tells of how a year earlier he undertook a study of the ANC and that “in fact this is when I began to reject definitively elements of the ANC and a lot of the socialist c*** that used to come from the CP (Communist Party) and its ranks”.
It is not clear whether they are being sincere albeit misguided or opportunistic about Biko’s view of the ANC. Judging from how frequently they change postures, it is hard for one to trust them any further. It would have taken a political occurrence of seismic proportions in which the ANC was at the centre for Biko to have even countenanced a meeting with them. In the five years between the interview cited and Biko’s death in September 1977, the ANC failed to capture the imagination of black society.
BC-aligned formations were dominating the public sphere. This is the only historical moment in recent history when the unbroken thread of non-racialism was conspicuous by its absence in black politics. The only blight on this perfectly black, radical reaction to racism was the eruption of industrial unrest in 1973 that has come to be known as the Durban Moment.
The Durban Moment, a series of industrial strikes was organised by a generation of emerging “white leftists”, “the new radicals”.
They were a splinter group from the National Union of South African Students (Nusas) that Biko condemned as accomplices in the racism visited on black society.
They had re-conceptualised the decisive antagonism as defined by Biko, mobilising blacks as workers, and not as a society with a defining historical experience. And by default, the Durban Moment is a BC moment.
The white leftists set up the Trade Union Advisory Co-ordinating Committee (TUACC) to be at the cutting edge of the mobilisation of black workers in factories, mainly in the Durban-Pinetown region and in the border industries north of Pretoria. TUACC set up advisory offices in the vicinity of factories and recruited black workers into a loosely organised labour movement. This was a mobilisation that went parallel with and determined to undermine BCM.
Posing as “the new radicals” more radical than BC they possessed superior knowledge about the complexities of historical materialism and the intersection between race and class. Benefiting from superior education from Wits University “the new radicals” became the custodians of a radical tradition both in academe and in political engagement.
Biko did not confront the Durban Moment as an aberration in a political conjuncture in which BC philosophy and praxis were mainstream instruments of mass mobilisation. But his unequivocal rejection of class struggle as a decisive antagonism is often overlooked.
And if Biko did not establish black exclusivism as an antithesis not to racism but to non-racialism, the Soweto revolt did. The revolt was a linchpin of Biko’s thought processes.
Another source cited to substantiate the claim that Biko was keen on the ANC is Peter Jones. Jones accompanied Biko to Cape Town in what was fated as his last trip. The purpose of the trip is said to have been to link up with Neville Alexander who would facilitate contact with the ANC.
The veracity of the claim Biko wanted to make contact with the ANC may not be in doubt. It is the presumption that he would be swallowed into the ANC rather than him doing the swallowing that is in question. If the purpose was the former and not the latter, then it was futile and inconsequential.
It would have been a shift from the more radical positions in relation to the ANC and PAC by some BC formations emerging in exile politics.
This demystification of the ANC and PAC could not have escaped Biko. It would have been strange for Biko to have wanted to unite a defunct ANC with a dead PAC.
Would Biko have joined the ANC because it was a mature thing to do if he, like Nkosazana Zuma, had been exiled? Many did, claiming that BC activism was only a stage that one had to grow through before reaching the maturity of the Congress tradition.
In reality they did because they knew even back then as they do now that it is cold outside the ANC.
* Lebelo is author and historian
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.