Black Consciousness Movement

In 1966, the Anglican Church under the incumbent, Archbishop Robert Selby Taylor, convened a meeting which later on led to the foundation of the University Christian Movement (UCM).

It eventually sparked a confrontation on 16 June 1976 in the Soweto uprising, when Black children marched to protest both linguistic imperialism and coercive Afrikaans medium education in the townships.

Although it successfully implemented a system of comprehensive local committees to facilitate organised resistance, the BCM itself was decimated by security action taken against its leaders and social programs.

In 1977, all BCM related organisations were banned, many of its leaders arrested, and their social programs dismantled under provisions of the newly implemented Internal Security Amendment Act.

On 12 September 1977, its banned National Leader, Steve Bantu Biko died from injuries that resulted from brutal assault while in the custody of the South African Police.

[4] The Black Consciousness Movement started to develop during the late 1960s, and was led by Steve Biko, Mamphela Ramphele, and Barney Pityana[citation needed].

During this period, which overlapped with apartheid, the ANC had committed to an armed struggle through its military wing Umkhonto we Sizwe, but this small guerrilla army was neither able to seize and hold territory in South Africa nor to win significant concessions through its efforts.

This line of thought was also reflected in the Pan-Africanist, Marcus Garvey, as well as Harlem Renaissance philosopher Alain Locke and in the salons of the sisters, Paulette and Jane Nardal in Paris.

Rather, Biko knew that for his struggle to give rise to physical liberation, it was necessary that it exist within the political and military realities of the apartheid regime, in which the armed power of the white government outmatched that of the black majority.

This meant rejecting the fervent "non-racialism" of the ANC in favour of asking whites to understand and support, but not to take leadership in, the Black Consciousness Movement.

Biko's BCM had much in common with other left-wing African nationalist movements of the time, such as Amílcar Cabral's PAIGC and Huey Newton's Black Panther Party.

[15] Even as the nation's leading opposition groups like the ANC proclaimed a commitment to armed struggle, their leaders had failed to organise a credible military effort.

The group formed Formation Schools to provide leadership seminars, and placed a great importance on decentralisation and autonomy, with no person serving as president for more than one year (although Biko was clearly the primary leader of the movement).

[citation needed] On top of building schools and day cares and taking part in other social projects, the BCM through the BCP was involved in the staging of the large-scale protests and workers' strikes that gripped the nation in 1972 and 1973, especially in Durban.

Indeed, in 1973 the government of South Africa began to clamp down on the movement, claiming that their ideas of black development were treasonous, and virtually the entire leadership of SASO and BCP were banned.

This was another encroachment against the black population, which generally spoke indigenous languages like Zulu and Xhosa at home, and saw English as offering more prospects for mobility and economic self-sufficiency than did Afrikaans.

[21] Following this, many members joined more concretely political and tightly structured parties such as the ANC, which used underground cells to maintain their organisational integrity despite banning by the government.

For instance, in 1980, Pityana formed the Black Consciousness Movement of Azania (BCMA), an avowedly Marxist group which used AZAPO as its political voice.

Curtis Nkondo from AZAPO and many members of AZASO and the Black Consciousness Media Workers Association joined the United Democratic Front (UDF).

Instead, they joined other organisations, including the ANC, the Unity Movement, the Pan Africanist Congress, the United Democratic Front and trade and civic unions.

In fact, these ideas helped make the complexity of the South African black political world, which can be so daunting to the newcomer or the casual observer, into a strength.

And its emphasis on individual psychological pride helped ordinary people realise they could not wait for distant leaders (who were often exiled or in prison) to liberate them.

Its focus on blackness as the major organising principle was very much downplayed by Nelson Mandela and his successors who to the contrary emphasised the multi-racial balance needed for the post-apartheid nation.

[32] According to Pallo Jordan "The great tragedy of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) was that it was never able to gather and retain much support beyond a narrow band of African intellectuals.

"[33] Donald Woods, a white South African liberal, was close friends with Biko and a number of other senior figures in the BCM, but nevertheless expressed concern about what he regarded as "the unavoidably racist aspects of Black Consciousness".

[35] The capital for many of these projects came from fundraising done by Father Aelred Stubbs through churches in Europe.The first funding opportunity was to assist newly released political prisoners and the start up costs income gathering families.

This assisted in economically restabilising the families of those with "political" criminal records as many communities branded these activists as trouble makers, making it difficult for them to secure employment.

Serote wrote from exile of his internalisation of the struggles, while Gwala's work was informed and inspired by the difficulty of life in his home township of Mpumalanga near Durban.

Adam Small is noted as a Coloured South African writer who was involved in the Black Consciousness Movement and wrote works in Afrikaans and English dealing with racial discrimination.

This poem gives an idea of the frustrations that blacks felt under apartheid: Freedom's child You have been denied too long Fill your lungs and cry rage Step forward and take your rightful place You are not going to grow up knocking at the back door....