When was black consciousness movement formed

On September 6, the police took their physical beatings of Biko too far. Biko collapsed. Instead of providing medical treatment, the police chained him to a gate in a standing position. They only called in a district surgeon the next day. Despite evidence of brain damage, the police kept Biko naked and chained up in his cell until his conditioned worsened. On September, the police loaded Biko naked into the back of a police van and drove him through the night to Pretoria Central Prison for medical care.

He was pronounced dead there on September 12, At first the government said Biko had died of a hunger strike. However, evidence from a postmortem examination proved that Biko had died of head injuries. An inquest into the death of Biko was held, but no one was convicted. The TRC denied amnesty to all of the police officers involved in the hearings.

This has influenced the way in which he has been celebrated and remembered. Biko is often placed at the center of histories of the Black Consciousness movement. He was one of the first liberation movement heroes to be memorialized in the post-apartheid era with a statue, his gravesite, and his home being dedicated in , the 20th anniversary of his death.

Yet many have claimed Biko as a progenitor or hero. Community members, people involved in the projects he ran, his friends and colleagues, political parties, and public intellectuals look to Biko. Almost all remember his good characteristics although his peers are more willing to recognize his faults. He is particularly seen as someone who sacrificed for the nation when in the post-apartheid period leaders from liberation movements are charged with corruption and self-serving politics.

He has also been elevated as a leading intellectual and political activist, someone who spoke out boldly and affirmed black dignity. For some, he stands as a revolutionary, while others see him as entrenched in community work. However, activists regrouped in various ways to continue their work. As Mbulelo Mzamane, Bavusile Maaba, and Nkosinathi Biko wrote, different views about the end goal of Black Consciousness manifested themselves in the directions activists took after For example, Malusi and Thoko Mpumlwana started the Zingisa Education Fund in the place of the Ginsberg Education Fund and later established the Trust for Christian Outreach and Education an umbrella for other community development organizations.

On the other hand, disagreements already stirring in the movement surfaced about what kind of action would move South Africa closer to freedom and the validity of an analysis that saw economic class as the main cause of inequality. Those advocating a more direct confrontation with the state had already begun to join armed organizations outside the country.

Other activists still in the country saw an above-ground political organization as the best way to embody Black Consciousness and affect change.

This resulted at times in physically violent clashes. Other activists took their conscientized outlook with them as they joined various existing organizations such as the ANC and the PAC. Some activists in exile, for instance, who had been part of the BCMA eventually decided an additional organization was unnecessary and joined other organizations. Different interpretations of Black Consciousness and various activists have persisted as people ask what it means to be free in a post-apartheid South Africa.

AZAPO is still a political party, although a minor one and it too has had breakaway factions. Others have written in the same style as Frank Talk.

Some have interpreted Black Consciousness simply as promoting black economic and political ascendency or a celebration of black culture which has translated into clothing lines, for instance. Others look to Black Consciousness for answers about how to uproot residual colonialism. In the early s, younger generations of South Africans, transcending political party boundaries, looked to Black Consciousness as a radical challenge to prevailing racial structures.

For example, university student movements in and evoked Black Consciousness when critiquing university curriculum and claiming a voice as youth. Some of these students saw a lack of black pride and economic inequality in South Africa as evidence of continued black oppression. Thus, black South Africans continue to evoke Black Consciousness.

Many scholars and writers have been inspired by Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness movement. This has resulted in a relatively large body of scholarship with authors primarily from South Africa and the United States taking perspectives ranging from the biographical and commemorative, political science, philosophy, history, and literary and visual arts.

The first authors who wrote about the Black Consciousness movement in the s and s included sympathetic political scientists and those seeking to commemorate Biko. The s saw further commemoration of Biko, but a greater analysis of the Black Consciousness movement. Even though it perpetuated the focus on Biko, it broadened the analysis of the movement to touch on theology, cultural production, community engagement, and gender.

This came as people questioned what it meant to be black and liberated in a post-apartheid, globalized world. More historical analyses were published as the s became more distant. These works explored the origins, contexts, and impact of the s movement. Daniel R. Magaziner published the first historical monograph of Black Consciousness. Repeated references to Black Consciousness in South African politics and the growth in scholarly work about the movement indicates that new questions will draw out different aspects of the history of Black Consciousness and Biko in the future.

More work on the various actors and broader reach of the movement, including a focus on different regional experiences and contemporary adaptations of Black Consciousness, could prove to be enlightening and productive avenues for further research.

In relation to the beginnings of Black Consciousness with SASO, there is a relative abundance of published primary sources and sources accessible online. On the other hand, many written records from the time when state repression and police harassment increased have been lost or destroyed.

Furthermore, after , the movement was more diffused, resulting in a less cohesive archive for this time period. The written record thus poses challenges for reconstructing the history of the Black Consciousness movement and Biko.

Historians have turned to various different sources to create a fuller picture of the movement. Most notably, they have conducted numerous oral histories to fill in the gaps of the written record. In addition to published primary sources, there are two main archival repositories in South Africa that hold substantial collections on Biko and the Black Consciousness movement, both written and oral sources.

The Historical Papers division of the William Cullen Library at the University of Witwatersrand has an extensive collection of material related to human and civil rights in South Africa.

Two other archives hold important materials. The Overcoming Apartheid website includes a multimedia resource page on the Black Consciousness movement with interviews from various activists. Overcoming Apartheid. South African History Online. Biko, I Write , Mbulelo V.

Pityana et al. In doing so, the movement reclaimed Christianity as a religion promoting liberation, a righteous cause with an assured victory. Cape Town: David Philip, , — Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets , chap.

Mngxitama, Alexander, and Gibson, Biko Lives! Temple Smith, ; Hilda Bernstein , No. Gail M. Both analyzed the relationship of the movement to political change. Gerhart , From Protest to Challenge , vol. Mangcu, Biko. By 28 October, the government enforced the Newspaper and Imprint Registration Act no 19, a version of an earlier act that required that all newspapers be registered and conform to a strict code of conduct. Newspapers were also required to lodge a large amount of money in the region of R as a deposit before they could publish.

The move was essentially a means to ensure that newspapers toed the line and regulated themselves, lest they be banned. Timeline: The Black Consciousness Movement. Share Flipboard Email. Angela Thompsell. Professor of British and African History. Angela Thompsell, Ph. Updated April 01, Featured Video. Cite this Article Format.

Thompsell, Angela. South Africa's Black Consciousness Movement in the s. A necessary step towards restoring dignity to Black people, according to Biko, involves elevating the heroes of African history and promoting African heritage to deconstruct the idea of Africa as the dark continent. Black consciousness seeks to extract the positive values within indigenous African cultures and to make it a standard with which Black people judge themselves — the first form of resistance towards imperialism and Apartheid.

In Apartheid South Africa, Black consciousness aimed to unite citizens under the main cause of their oppression. According to Biko, Black theology must preach that it is a sin to allow oneself to be oppressed.

He continued to defy the banning order, however, by supporting the Convention, leading to several arrests in the following years. On 21 August , Biko was detained by the police and held at the eastern city of Port Elizabeth, where he was violently tortured and interrogated. By 11 September, he was found naked and chained to a prison cell door. He died in a hospital cell the following day as a result of brain injuries sustained at the hands of the police.

Black consciousness was beyond a movement; it was a philosophy deeply grounded in African Humanism, for which Biko should be considered not only an activist but a philosopher in his own right.