Revisiting Biko’s credo on identity
Author debunks some myths
TITLE: Biko: Philosophy, Identity and Liberation AUTHOR: Mabogo Percy More PUBLISHER: HSRC Press REVIEWER: Jo-Mangaliso Mdhlela Slightly more than 40 years after his death on September 12 1977, Stephen Bantu Biko’s name has not stopped being revered by millions of black people for his emancipatory project of contributing to the philosophy of Black Consciousness – with its roots in the nascent black student movement inspired by the “the black radical tradition”.
In his new nonfiction book, Biko: Philosophy, Identity and Liberation, professor of philosophy at the University of Limpopo, Mabogo Percy More, explores the life of Biko as the “father” of Black Consciousness, describing him as the “foundation of Black Consciousness in South Africa”.
He asserts there is “simply no way one can talk about Biko, [the existentialist philosopher], without talking about Black Consciousness”.
Significantly, the author debunks the myth that the Black Consciousness Movement came about as a result of “the political vacuum created by the banning of the ANC, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and other political organisations”.
This, the author argues, is myopic and, in the words of Zimbabwean academic Ibbo Mandaza, “there are no vacuums in history, least of all in that of the Struggle”, that “Black Consciousness is part of a long line of black activism and radical philosophical tradition ... traceable to the thinking of Martin Delaney three centuries ago”.
Delaney, an African-American, was a black writer widely regarded as the first proponent of black nationalism.
Delaney argued that black people, and no one else, ought to be their own saviours, and architects of their own liberation. To achieve this they have to “[come] to consciousness of their blackness” [as] a necessary condition for their eventual liberation”.
This awareness of their state of “being” opens their eyes to their own lived reality, informed by the “existential, social and political peculiarities” of the SA context.
Biko and his comrades embraced that “black radical tradition” when they broke ties with the white-controlled and liberal-oriented National Union of SA Students (Nusas) to form the SA Student Organisation (Saso) in 1968 with Biko elected as its first president.
The Black Consciousness Movement came under the influence of the Negritude Movement, giving it shape and content and philosophical orientation, likewise agitating the notion that “The black man [woman] is negritude because he cannot hate himself, and cannot hate his being without ceasing to be”.
And so came the Black Consciousness slogan, “Black man you are on your own”. This galvanised black people to the unshackling of oppression brought about by self-doubt, self-hatred, loss of self-identity and consciousness caused by colonialism, white domination and oppression.
Biko argues that “one of the tragedies arising from racism is the effect of self-negation ... the black ... rejects himself, precisely because he attaches the meaning [of] white to all that is good, in other words he associates good and equates good with white”.
To bolster the point, the author invokes Malcolm X: “This was my first step toward selfdegradation: when I endured all the pain ... to have my hair look like a white man’s hair. I had joined that multitude of Negro men and women ... who are brainwashed into believing that the black people are inferior – and white people superior – that they will even violate and mutilate their God-created bodies to try to look ‘pretty’ by white standards.”
Malcolm X’s point is confirmed by Maya Angelou, the black writer and poet, who said: “Wouldn’t they be surprised when one day I woke up out of my black ugly dream, and my real hair, which was long and blonde, would take the place of the kinky mass that Momma would not let me straighten?”
In this book we find not the dead Biko, but a resurrected existentialist philosopher, continuing to urge black people not to deny who they are, but seeking, in the words of More, to ask: “Is the white person to be the sole definer of reality, including black reality?” Biko thought differently.