Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity

Twenty-six years into a constitutional democracy in South Africa and the majority of black Africans continue to suffer from institutionalised racism, high levels of poverty, racialised inequalities, unemployment, landlessness, and economic inactivity. This paper discusses the main barriers to true liberation and development, such as the institutionalised racism and white supremacy, which have been embedded in our constitutional democratic state. This paper presents an argument that until the democratic status quo and the constitution are challenged and reviewed, black people of South Africa will continue to be oppressed by racist institutions which breed and reproduces white supremacy. This challenge for the emancipation of black South Africans from institutionalised racism and white supremacy forms the foundation of a post-apartheid liberation struggle. The future and salvation of a black impoverished society lies in African philosophical ideologies such as Black Consciousness and Pan Africanism. Only from a position of socioeconomic power will black Africans dismantle institutionalised racism an conquer white supremacy

Impact Factor(JCC): 1.3648-This article can be downloaded from www.impactjournals.us ABSTRACT The question of African identity from various philosophical or ideological perspectives has been interestingly playing a role that appears to negate the psyche of the African personality. This negation paradoxically has been unconsciously exhumed by the flare for Black Consciousness. Steve Biko's Philosophy of Black Consciousness though exposed the contradictions inherent in the position held by the " Liberals " in South Africa, but he failed to resolve the core matter of African Identity. We argue that the notion of Black Consciousness instead of promoting neutrality of human nature and African identity, it created and built into the psyche of the people and current generation a vengeful disposition which contradicts identity of the core African.

Scholarship on Black Consciousness in the so-called post-apartheid South Africa is not as prominent as its counterpart within the Congress tradition. The fundamental reason for this is the hegemony and pervasiveness of whiteness and its aversion to the Black Radical Tradition. Another reason is the "success" of the Congress tradition as epitomized by the ANC through its so-called negotiations to usher in an era that is compatible with its political vision of a non-racial constitutional new South Africa. It is in this sense that the intellectual and ideological marginalization of the Azanian tradition which Black Consciousness is a part of, is intimately linked to the "failure" of its political vision. In other words, the triumph of the democratisation paradigm, instead of the decolonisation paradigm (Ramose, 2005) is not only political but is also epistemological and ideological.

2020

Race, how it is constructed in our society and how this reflects the perception of how humanity should be defined is an issue that has been highly scrutinized by many post-colonial theorists. Steve Biko, being one, analyses this in Biko (1978/2017) through specific lenses. In this summary, I will be critically reflecting on his argument on the question of black humanity in post-colonial South Africa using the Biko (1978/2017) and Du Bois (1908/2012) texts.

2013

In the history of South African racial relations, perpetrators of racism appear to have been largely white while the victims have been largely black. In postindependent South Africa white people appear to condemn racism and all practices and institutions that seek to defend or promote it. The end of colonialism and apartheid together with the introduction of equality among all citizens, the successful debunking of racial difference and the attainment of power by black people – levels the race field so to speak. While it would have been unimaginable to think of a black person as a racist in the past – particularly against white people – it has now become common both in the public political sphere and in private interactions, for white people to accuse black people of being racist. This article seeks to appraise the charge of black racism. I seek to investigate whether as a concept the notion of black racism is sound. Secondly, since racism is an act that is offensive to the victims, ...

Both sides in the struggle in South Africa in 1988 had their own slogans and their own perspective on the political situation. I was priveleged to work among educated black South African at the Federal Theological Seminary, and though I would not claim to speak for them, it seemd to me that the black case reflecte the facts, while the white opposition to this was founded on double-speak and illusions.

This paper seeks to engage with the reality of South Africa, from the position of being black in South Africa. It is impossible to have any meaningful engagement about South Africa without an understanding of the history that brings it about. This is a history of conquest and colonisation, which we shall argue has not been undone albeit the post 1994 settlement. Philosophy in South Africa is tied to such a history like a child is tied to mother through an umbilical cord. This is to say Philosophy in South Africa is a form of colonialism which finds expression through the negation of the black/colonized experience in the construction of its enterprise. Philosophy is a product of experience, and in South Africa it is the white experience of the world that is constitutive of philosophy as such. This paper seeks to articulate the black experience of the world through a perspective that is opposed to the violent existence of South Africa to date, and this shall be done through a critical exposition of Ndumiso Dladla's Here is a Table: A Philosophical Essay on the History of Race in South Africa (Bantu Logic Publishing, 2018), a timely intervention which makes such a reflection possible. This is the Azanian critical philosophy that is opposed to the conquest and colonisation of the indigenous people in the unjust wars of colonization that Dladla (2018) elucidates. If by integration you understand a breakthrough into white society by blacks, an assimilation and acceptance into an already established set of norms and code of behavior set up and maintained by whites, then YES I am against it. I am against the superior-inferior white-black stratification that makes the white a perpetual teacher and the black a perpetual pupil (and a poor one at that).I am against the intellectual arrogance of white people that makes them believe that white leadership is a sine qua non in this country and that whites are divinely appointed pace-setters in progress. I am against the fact that a settler minority should impose a system of values on an indigenous people.-Steve Bantubonke Biko (2004:26) Introduction The colonial character of South African philosophical practice, which we aim to discuss in this paper, is a by-product and expression of the European colonial enterprise which found its articulation with the arrival of the first Dutch settlers of 1652 and the British 1820 settlers. Both settler populations were unified against the indigenous conquered population after the resulting