2, gave the most comprehensive summary of the movement to that date, and Bhekizizwe Peterson’s chapter in the same volume focused on Black Consciousness literary and other cultural work.19 Former activists, friends, and politicians continued to add their personal reflections in monographs and edited collections, particularly at anniversaries of Biko’s death.20 Biographies and edited collections in the early 2000s dealt with Black Consciousness’s philosophical, intellectual, and cultural production. Mbulelo V. Mzamane, “The Impact of Black Consciousness on Culture,” in Bounds of Possibility: The Legacy of Steve Biko and Black Consciousness, ed. Do you believe that guilt offers only a weak rationale for opposing apartheid? Biko was banished to his home district in the Eastern Cape, where he continued to build community development programs and have a strong political influence. Furthermore, after 1977, the movement was more diffused, resulting in a less cohesive archive for this time period. This kind of community involvement and devotion influenced each of her children in their chosen professions later in life. If Biko were alive he would disappointed by the levels of societal ills such as xenophobia, crimes, declining morality among Black Africans. Do you believe white South Africans were oppressed by apartheid? . Leslie Anne Hadfield provided an in-depth analysis of the movement’s extensive community development work in Liberation and Development.22 Other scholars have emphasized Biko’s longer intellectual heritage, manifested in the museum exhibit at the Steve Biko Centre in Ginsberg, and in Xolela Mangcu’s biography of Biko.23 These, along with other works published at the same time, notably dealt with questions about the place of women and youth in the movement.24. For example, Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander, and Nigel Gibson’s Biko Lives! The minister of justice declared the rallies illegal just before they were to take place. Biko continued to work on unifying the various black groups even under his banning orders. “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor [was] the mind of the oppressed,” Biko argued.2 Thus, Black Consciousness activists worked to change the black mindset, to look inward to build black capacity to realize their own liberation. 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. Using the pseudonym Frank Talk, he instituted a series in SASO’s newsletter entitled, “I Write What I Like,” where he tackled a number of issues and explained Black Consciousness. It was in SASO that activists formulated the Black Consciousness philosophy. Poets such as Oswald Mtshali, Mongane Wally Serote, Don Mattera, Mafika Pascal Gwala, and James Matthews, among others, similarly dealt with black oppression and sought to inspire hope in black self-determination with positive images and themes of resistance and redemption. SASO laid the foundation for what would grow beyond universities and student groups to become a wider movement. The principal aim of the BPC was defined as fostering black political unity in the Black Consciousness sense in order to achieve psychological and physical liberation. . Some even smoked cigarettes in public. It has accessions with materials on: Steve Biko; SASO; AZAPO and the Azanian Student’s Organization; the Black People’s Convention; the SASO-BPC trial; and the research materials of Thomas Karis and Gail M. Gerhart used to write From Protest to Challenge (also available on microfilm at the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago). Mzamane, Maaba, and Biko, “The Black Consciousness Movement”; Peterson, “Culture, Resistance and Representation.”. Later, Biko began to rethink the role that racial identity should play in anti-apartheid activism. The philosophical core of SASO was black consciousness: an assertive affirmation of black identity. Steve Biko once said, “The Black man has become a shell, a shadow of man, completely defeated, drowning in his own misery, a slave, an ox bearing the yoke of oppression with sheepish timidity.”. SASO began with a few black students who worked to recruit other students across black campuses. Historians have turned to various different sources to create a fuller picture of the movement. Articulate and charismatic, Steve Biko was one of the movement’s foremost instigators and prolific writers. The BCP eventually moved to run its own projects when activists working for the organization found themselves restricted to their home areas by banning orders in 1973. In the latter part of the decade, the major anti-apartheid organizations worked underground or in exile. The student uprisings of 1976, along with other adult leaders who became involved in running community programs in Soweto (such as Ramsey Ramokgopa and Oshadi Mangena), are evidence of the way Black Consciousness ideas changed South African thinking among different groups of people in various corners of the country.10, State repression profoundly shaped the context and direction of the Black Consciousness movement. If so, in what way(s)? He saw the power that could come from organizing as blacks. 9. It also holds several valuable accessions on related organizations, such as the papers of the Christian Institute and the South African Council of Churches and their joint program, Spro-cas, the parent organization of the BCP and the papers of the University Christian Movement, and NUSAS. The students learned from their experiences and drew upon the methodologies of Freire in particular to help them refine this work. Ideologically an African nationalist and African socialist, he was at the forefront of a grassroots anti-apartheid campaign known as 13. . Biko lived with Coloured neighbors, and Ginsberg’s Weir Hall hosted a number of musical events. This fact situates Black Consciousness within the ambit of phenomenology precisely because …, phenomenology is the study of phenomena as they appear to consciousness — that is, reality as constituted by consciousness in the sense in which consciousness is understood as always consciousness of something. Confrontation with the state escalated first in 1972, when Tiro, the Student Representative Council president at the University of the North, gave a speech criticizing the university’s white leadership and the racial discrimination infused in its education.