Black Consciousness and Progressive Movements under

i ii Black Consciousness and Progressive Movements under Apartheid

Ian M. Macqueen

iii Published in 2018 by University of KwaZulu-Natal Press Private Bag X01 Scottsville, 3209 Pietermaritzburg Email: [email protected] Website: www.ukznpress.co.za

© 2018 Ian M. Macqueen

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

ISBN: 978 1 86914 388 6 e-ISBN: 978 1 86914 389 3

Managing editor: Sally Hines Editor: Alison Lockhart Proofreader: Cathy Munro Layout: Patricia Comrie Indexer: Christopher Merrett Cover design: Marise Bauer, MDesign Cover images (clockwise from top): Aelred Stubbs (CR) (The Community of the Resurrection Collection, AB3181/C1, Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand); Rick Turner (Helen Joseph Collection, A1985, Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand); Steve (photographer Fraser MacLean; Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand; permission to use this image was granted by the Foundation); Donald Woods (photographer: Fraser MacLean; Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand; permission to use this image was granted by the Steve Biko Foundation); (photographer: Fraser MacLean; Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand; permission to use this image was granted by the Steve Biko Foundation).

Print administration by DJE Flexible Print Solutions, Cape Town iv Contents

Acknowledgements vii Abbreviations ix

Introduction: Putting Black Consciousness into Conversation with Progressive Movements under Apartheid 1 1 The Christian Roots of Black Consciousness 23 2 Black Consciousness and Student Protest in the Late 1960s 57 3 The ‘ Moment’, 1970–1974 99 4 Women’s Liberation and the Limits of Freedom 138 5 The Radicalisation of the Christian Institute 165 6 The State Responds 201 Conclusion: From the 1970s to Post-apartheid South Africa 222

Select Bibliography 241 Index 257

v vi Acknowledgements

This book has been a long time in the making. It began in my Honours year at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in 2005 with a comment by Professor Catherine Burns and has taken me through a doctorate and a postdoctoral fellowship and sustained me into a full-time position at the University of Pretoria. The key image that caught my attention – the debates between Steve Biko and Rick Turner in Durban in the 1970s – has functioned as the main organising idea for the research that followed and the book I present here. It is my hope that such a relationship – fraught but productive – can inspire a new generation of students and activists to a radical but tolerant politics, which does not shy away from difficult discussions, but simultaneously never sacrifices the present treasures in the pursuit of the grand ideal, the ‘big idea’, which gives power to all ideologies. This book has developed through the support of many different people. It was made possible firstly by Professor Saul Dubow who took me on as a doctoral student at the University of Sussex in 2007. I was able to complete my doctorate in 2011, with Professor Alan Lester as my joint supervisor. A postdoctoral fellowship at the Society, Work and Development Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, under the care of Professor Karl von Holdt allowed me the space and time to rewrite the thesis into its current form as a book and to undertake additional research. Professor Zimitri Erasmus was generous with her time as well, acting as a research mentor. My thanks to Gerhard Maré, Richard Pithouse, Vashna Jagarnath, Nafissa Sheik and Stephen Sparks for input into Chapter 3 at an early stage of its writing. Thank you also to Professor Catherine Burns for her comments on a draft version of this chapter and to the participants of the Southern Africa Seminar, University of London, and the History and African Studies Seminar, University of KwaZulu-Natal, for their questions and feedback. My

vii thanks to the anonymous readers for their critical input as well as to Sally Hines, Alison Lockhart and Cathy Munro for making this a better book. My main source of funding came from the National Research Foundation in the form of an Innovation Postdoctoral Award that made it possible to travel to Cape Town, Ginsberg and Durban to conduct additional research and interviews. My sincere thanks to those who entertained my questions and so generously gave their insights into the period. My doctoral studies at the University of Sussex were made possible by the Overseas Student Research Award Scheme, as well as from the European History Network project, Creating Links and Overviews for a New History Agenda. My family was my constant support through the whole process, from my aunt, Eona Macqueen, who provided the funds for my doctoral tuition, to my parents who supported me through some dark times. I had the privilege of meeting my wife, Marta, in 2011, following the advice of Saul Dubow that marriage could only follow the doctorate(!) and the following years have been all the richer for that relationship, gifting me with two sons. While acknowledging the rhetorical purpose of Turner’s use of the parable of the ‘eye of the needle’, it is my belief that hope remains only in such an ethics as that encapsulated in Jesus’s life and teaching – people require transformation as much as systems – an insight that I think resonates with Biko’s fundamental premise. While impossible to determine just how many of the activists followed this as a transcendental belief, or followed Christ (some explicitly refuted belief), it was nonetheless a powerful touchstone of transformative ethics. I acknowledge this Presence and Person in my life, and especially over the ten years of this study: Soli Deo gloria.

viii Abbreviations

ANC African National Congress ARM African Resistance Movement ASF Anglican Students’ Federation ASSECA Association for the Educational and Cultural Advancement of African People of South Africa AZAPO Azanian People’s Organisation BCM Black Consciousness Movement BCP Black Community Programmes BPC Black People’s Convention BWF Black Women’s Federation BWP Black Workers’ Project CCSA Christian Council of South Africa CI Christian Institute CR Community of the Resurrection DRC Dutch Reformed Church FEDSEM Federal Theological Seminary of Southern Africa FOSATU Federation of South African Trade Unions ICT Institute of Contextual Theology IDAMASA Inter-Denominational African Ministers Association in South Africa IIE Institute for Industrial Education MK Umkhonto weSizwe NCFS National Catholic Federation of Students NUSAS National Union of South African Students PAC Pan Africanist Congress SACBC Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference SACC South African Council of Churches SACP South Party SAIRR South African Institute of Race Relations

ix SASO South African Students’ Organisation SCA Student Christian Association SPRO-CAS Study Project on Christianity in Apartheid Society SRC Student Representative Council TUACC Trade Union Advisory and Co-ordinating Council UCM University Christian Movement UDF United Democratic Front UNB University of Natal Black Section UNNE University of Natal [Medical School] Non-European Section WSCF World Student Christian Federation YCW Young Christian Workers YMCA Young Men’s Christian Association YWCA Young Women’s Christian Association

x Introduction 1

Introduction

Putting Black Consciousness into Conversation with Progressive Movements under Apartheid

n our current political dispensation, we are reminded again that Ithe past and present are deeply contested. As political parties and popular movements, such as and Fees Must Fall most recently, have sought sources of inspiration, history has become a valued strategic terrain from which to assert claims to the present, evident by the overt linking by present-day students of their protests to the of 16 June 1976, which is now celebrated as the public holiday Youth Day. This book seeks to engage with that history, particularly the decade that has most recently seemed to inspire popular imagination – the 1970s. In that decade, activists reignited the struggle against apartheid and reorganised the trade union movement after the Durban Strikes of 1973, Black Consciousness flowered under the iconic leader Stephen Bantu Biko, culminating in open rebellion in the Soweto Uprising. The legacy of that decade has taken many forms in contemporary South Africa. The trade union movement remains a powerful, if weakened, force. The young students of that generation are today’s leaders. Black Consciousness remains a vibrant yet underground stream of thinking, bubbling to the surface in radical social critiques and sometimes in open debate. Abuses by those in power and continued economic disempowerment have given added credence and power to fresh analyses of South African post-apartheid life, such as that presented by Black Consciousness.1 This book is part of an effort of a new generation of scholars who have re-examined the 1970s in South Africa. Beginning in 2010, with historian Daniel Magaziner’s bold reinterpretation of the Black Consciousness Movement as fundamentally an intellectual and religious movement, 2012 saw the first biography of Biko by the

1 2 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS public intellectual, Xolela Mangcu, and the ‘generational memoir’ of the 1970s by anti-apartheid activist Glenn Moss in 2014.2 American art historian Shannen Hill has produced an important monograph that provides a detailed overview of the cultural dimensions of the Black Consciousness Movement.3 More recently, University of the Witwatersrand historian Julian Brown has called for the need to break down silos of South African historiography between ‘workers’ and ‘students’ and ‘black’ and ‘white’ and has provided a compelling overview of the cumulative protests that constituted the ‘road to Soweto’.4 Lastly, the historian Leslie Hadfield has mapped out the remarkable community development projects of the Black Community Programmes (BCP) through meticulous oral interviews.5 This book is part of this broader rethinking of the 1970s and owes much to this community of scholars for its insights. My thinking was also particularly stimulated by a little-known doctoral study by Mabel Maimela that draws attention to the distinction between the rhetoric of the Black Consciousness Movement, which rejected co-operation with liberals, and the reality of the organisation, which depended heavily on such liberals for monetary support, a relationship that Maimela characterises as ‘paradoxical’.6 While building on this scholarship, this book nonetheless offers something distinctive in its focus on the broad debates and conversations that were so critical for this remarkable period of South African history, between Black Consciousness and what this book characterises as ‘progressive movements’; that is, either formal organisations or looser collections of individuals who were committed to social change and reform. As Jeff Goodwin and James M. Jasper observe: ‘Social movements are conscious, concerted, and sustained efforts by ordinary people to change some aspect of their society by using extra-institutional means’ and thus transcend specific protests, fashions or even formal organisations.7 This book contributes to the study of Black Consciousness in South Africa by (1) stressing its relationship with other intellectual currents of its time in distinct urban spaces, to which it defined itself in opposition. The book argues against depictions of Black Consciousness as anti-white, elitist and separatist, and instead (2) points to its rootedness in South African civil society and in a context of liberation struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. Introduction 3

I explore the relationships and geographical spaces that shaped the contours of Black Consciousness’s early discourse and show (3) how these relationships facilitated the channelling of its message in ‘shock waves’ that reconfigured relationships and institutions within its orbit. The movement was connected at an intimate level to a wide range of South African institutions, such as churches, trade unions and the South African Institute of Race Relations, which broadened the impact of its ideas on South Africa. Such a focus emphasises the complex relationships that characterise the history of Black Consciousness, asserting the importance of Black Consciousness as a spark for renewed debate across these groups. This book is not an attempt to reduce Black Consciousness to the sum of its interactions, but to assert its importance as a South African moment, that transcended its own ideological boundaries. This book seeks to evoke the creation of alternative spaces, where people attempted to ‘reimagine South Africa’ through their lifestyle choices and politics. Such alternative spaces were areas such as Durban, Turfloop, Jorissen Street in , King William’s Town, Stellenbosch and Cape Town that drew activists from multiple intellectual currents. Part of the significance of Black Consciousness, however, was in its assertion of independence, a fierce independence of the mind that demanded it choose a path free from white interference. This principle was a spur to fruitful contacts and collaboration in a number of cases discussed in this book. Hilary Sapire and Jo Beall stress that South African cities ‘could also be places of social contact and intimacy across the colour line’ and ‘dynamic sites of innovation, change and reconstruction’ during apartheid.8 By focusing more closely on the context of the late 1960s and 1970s, a vivid picture emerges of a small but vital civil society, working against state abuses and attempting to achieve social justice. It was for this small cluster of organisations and individuals that the emergence of Black Consciousness reconstituted relationships and world views, what this book describes as ‘shockwaves’. Black Consciousness and Progressive Movements under Apartheid is also an offering to a broader field of research, perhaps best demonstrated by the historian Jacob Dlamini who, in his fascinating account of Glory Sedibe, the African National Congress (ANC) operative who turned to serve as an Askari under the infamous 4 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

Vlakplaas commander Eugene de Kock, has sought to ‘render South Africa’s contemporary history in a manner that does not take race and apartheid’s language of race at face value’ and ‘does not buy into apartheid’s assumptions about how race determined the moral choices and political loyalties of individuals’.9 This book also seeks to contribute to the discussion by broadening the focus and calling for closer attention to the context of the Black Consciousness Movement in the 1970s and similarly refuses to take the Movement’s ‘language of race at face value’. It aims to demonstrate the unique constellation of individuals and organisations and to assert the importance of the dialogue and conversations across races that occurred at this time, the broader significance of which is the reassessment of the key dilemmas of the constitution of the South African nation, which, as Ivor Chipkin and others have shown, remains a key contested idea in South Africa’s democracy.10 As Magaziner argues, Black Consciousness also engaged with classical political ideas of citizenship, race, class and the meaning of liberation. Black Consciousness activists were deeply opposed to the policies of the apartheid government and instead envisaged a common South African nation, in which as Biko described it, there would be no ethnic divisions or minorities, but only ‘the people’. The type of freedom that Black Consciousness activists fought for had deeper resonances, for, as Chipkin notes, ‘granting democratic rights to “Blacks” in South Africa raised the question of the limits of the South African nation’.11 As such, calls for political rights also constituted a call for a reconfiguration of the nation.

Black Consciousness in perspective A protean movement, the product of its time, the Black Consciousness Movement drew from diverse trajectories of ideas constituted in distinct spaces, ideas moulded to fit a purpose – to resuscitate black pride and to generate a renewed project of political empowerment. Black Consciousness emphasised a ‘way of life’, which those oppressed by apartheid should adopt, to embody a liberated mind. Drawing from postcolonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, activists critiqued the values of Western modernity and colonialism, and challenged the ideas underlying power relations in South Africa. Their definition of ‘black’ undermined apartheid ethnic categories, by grouping all oppressed under a common identity. Introduction 5

The essential political project of Black Consciousness was the overthrow of the yoke of colonialism in its modern form of apartheid. In this, it shared a deep historical connection with the anti- colonial struggles of the world. As a result, its proponents’ writings were often interspersed with both examples from history as well as references to the anti-colonial struggles of other countries in Africa and to the leaders of those struggles. However, within South Africa, these discussions occurred within a particular context, urban contexts that ensured a heterodox collection of individuals and intellectual discourses. Focusing on this wider milieu is useful because it helps us to understand the significance of Black Consciousness as a moment in South African history that resonated with diverse quarters and ensured a sharp and rejuvenated dialogue with parties who were receptive to its ideas and willing to listen. Such a focus seeks to move beyond a narrower concern with political movements vis-à-vis the national struggle, to explore the range of ideas and concerns that such an outlook occludes. A standard criticism of Black Consciousness is that it was an ‘American import’. It was viewed with some suspicion by the ANC leaders incarcerated on Robben Island, who rightly asserted the presence of black unity before the 1970s and the long history of those struggles. Past South African president, founding member of Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) and long-serving prisoner Nelson Mandela also noted the impact of the ideological polarisation of the Cold War, where the rejection of communism by Black Consciousness activists and the support they received from ‘the imperialist countries’ led to suspicion from certain quarters of the liberation movement.12 Mandela expressed his own criticism, evident in one condescending observation penned in 1978 while he was still in prison: ‘In a cosmopolitan environment where common sense and experience demand that freedom fighters be guided by progressive ideas and not by mere colour, the ideology of the BCM [Black Consciousness Movement] remains embryonic and clannish.’13 Mandela’s analysis of the reason for this ‘embryonic’ ideology was: ‘the concept of Black Consciousness advocated by the BCM is imported from America and swallowed in a lump without regard to our concrete situation, in which progressive whites, including Marxists, liberals, missionaries, professionals and businessmen form part of the liberation movement and fight the enemy with the most 6 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS militant methods’. Mandela summed up Black Consciousness as ‘in essence a rehash of Garveyism, a militant form of nationalism’.14 It is true that Black Consciousness resonated with the earlier race nationalism of Marcus Garvey and that it derived ideas from the United States, as scholars such as George Fredrickson have discussed, in particular Charles Hamilton and Stokely Carmichael’s Black Power.15 It also drew ideas from the anti-colonial struggles of the ‘Third World’ and its theorists – Fanon, Léopold Senghor, Amílcar Cabral and others. Part of the significance of Black Consciousness internationally, indeed, was the ability for its ideas to be distilled from an international context and adapted to local conditions. Thus activists modulated its content and targeted it with regard to local conditions. In South Africa it was more than a secular, student-based movement, but a wider cultural renaissance that impacted and was shaped in turn by those within its orbit. The analysis presented in this book tends strongly then to an intellectual history, with close emphasis on the ideas and debates that animated discussions. Part of the power of Black Consciousness lay in its rhetorical force and its sophisticated analysis, which emphasised the psychological dimension of oppression and personal agency, that the oppressed should liberate themselves through a ‘style’ or ‘way of life’. This ‘style’, which grasped liberation as an immediately realisable goal rather than a distant utopian ideal, made a marked impact on a wide spectrum of people and organisations, loosely termed the ‘above-ground’ opposition to apartheid.16 It also stood in marked contrast, therefore, to the thinking of the South African Communist Party and the ANC, which emphasised careful organising and patience in the pursuit of political and economic freedom. The Movement had rumoured ties with the underground armed struggle, as some members established links with the older ANC activists, who functioned as ‘bearers of history, bearers of experience, bearers of anecdotes, bearers of the Congress culture’.17 While acknowledging this older seam of struggle, this book emphasises the importance of the above-ground resistance to apartheid, whereby Black Consciousness challenged the ideological underpinnings of apartheid, whether in the form of theology, culture or the arts, and led to a psychological liberation that enabled ordinary people to challenge the state’s power. Introduction 7

Barney Pityana would later characterise Black Consciousness as a ‘meta-narrative of liberation that was unifying rather than particularising’ and ran parallel to the established liberation movements and thus saw no conflict in his personal involvement with both the ANC and Black Consciousness.18 It was a movement that matured, furthermore, as its early advocates progressed through their studies, left university and took up employment in a variety of occupations. Among many activists, Black Consciousness was retrospectively identified as a ‘stage’ of their political development, as many left the country and helped breathe new life into a moribund exiled ANC.19 Another critique of Black Consciousness emphasised its ‘elitist’ nature and its failure to connect with workers.20 However, the sometimes obtuse writings of the Movement, found in its circular, the SASO Newsletter and other publications, were distilled into pithy slogans such as ‘Black man, you are on your own’ and powerful symbols such as the raised clenched fist, which gained much wider and visceral currency among the youth.21 Part of the influence on the youth was also the result of direct contact through teachers, following the completion of their studies at university, as Tshepo Moloi shows in his study of Bodibeng High School, Maokeng, Kroonstad, in the northern Free State.22 Unlike its characterisation as predominantly a movement of intellectuals, Black Consciousness activists had a strong ethos of community involvement and students were encouraged to plough back their skills and knowledge into their local communities. This was done methodically by applying the ideas of the radical Brazilian educator and theorist Paulo Freire to their praxis.23 That Black Consciousness remains relevant – and indeed has resurfaced in a robust way in the twenty-first century – indicates that its content was richer and deeper than an exclusive appeal for enfranchisement. Black Consciousness-era activists have again become an important voice, challenging corrupt power in the post-apartheid era. In an open letter in 2013, Pityana, a founding member of the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO), openly called for the then president Jacob Zuma to step down from public office on the grounds of his ineffectual and morally compromised leadership.24 8 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

Another past activist, Mosiuoa Lekota, leads the Congress of the People (COPE), the breakaway faction that left the ANC in 2008. The ideas of Black Consciousness have also experienced a resurgence of interest, appealing particularly to the unemployed youth in the townships,25 combined with a sense that the inequalities that developed under apartheid remain in place, with whites dominating the gains of the economy while blacks stay trapped in a morass of inequality.26 In a chapter in State of the Nation: South Africa 2008, Thiven Reddy also argues that Black Consciousness remains relevant for South Africa because the inequalities created under apartheid and coded by race remain so entrenched and, indeed, have deepened, thus creating the need for a renewed focus on the political project of Black Consciousness.27

Looking back On 24 October 1972 American political scientist Gail Gerhart interviewed Biko, leader of the Black Consciousness Movement. At the time of the interview, Biko worked for a project of research and community action funded and co-ordinated by the church, the Study Project on Christianity in Apartheid Society, known as SPRO-CAS.28 Black activists had convinced the project’s directors that its community action branch needed to be segregated: the black-run BCP and a separate white conscientisation programme. The interview took place at the BCP offices in downtown Durban, at 86 Beatrice Street, a building the BCP shared with the three-year-old black student organisation, SASO, which had broken away from the multiracial National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) in 1968. Gerhart’s first question to Biko probed the ‘intellectual origins’ of the Movement to gain insight into a new political discourse that was reported in newspapers and hotly debated, also referred to as ‘Black Power’. He replied that Black Consciousness needed to be seen comparatively: ‘We have to see this evolution of black consciousness side by side with other political doctrines in this country, and other movements of resistance.’29 The apartheid government’s quashing of African political parties in the 1960s had left the stage ‘open to whites of liberal opinion to make representations for blacks, in a way that had not happened in the past, unaccompanied by black opinion’. Biko’s broad view of the evolution of Black Consciousness in South Africa has been acknowledged by some scholars, but quickly passed Introduction 9 over. Historians have been more interested to question the influence of Black Consciousness on the Soweto Uprising of June 1976 and, implicitly, its contribution to the demise of apartheid. This historical focus, which fits neatly into the grand narrative christened ‘The Road to Democracy in South Africa’,30 has limited the ability to see Black Consciousness in the way Biko himself advised Gerhart, vis-à-vis ‘other movements of resistance’. Biko’s comparison was deliberately vague: the 1960s had been a decade of resistance to colonialism in Africa and the Far East and youth revolt against capitalism in the West, and Biko’s emphasis on the plural in ‘movements’ and ‘political doctrines’ was exactly right. Arthur Marwick attempted to capture the quintessence of the 1960s in the West as the creation of ‘large numbers of new subcultures’, ‘which then expanded and interacted with each other, thus creating the pullulating flux which characterizes the era’.31 South Africa’s 1960s were more muted, as the National Party consolidated its control under high apartheid. Instead, the early 1970s was South Africa’s radical moment and young black students were a critical part of a drama that began with their walkout from the NUSAS conference in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape in 1967. In South Africa this ‘pullulating flux’ was indelibly shaped by apartheid, resulting in fractured solidarities across what could otherwise have been mutually complementary political and cultural movements. The exiled political scientist Sam Nolutshungu saw this clearly when he wrote in the early 1980s that ‘the character of the state conditions not only the terms of domination and submission but also the ideologies and political behaviour that challenge and reject it’.32 Thus there was repeated emphasis by SASO activists to distance themselves from the causes of progressive white students and women’s liberation. The location of Biko’s interview with Gerhart was also significant. The office in Beatrice Street was an institutional space that exemplified the Movement. Although the rhetoric of Black Consciousness espoused polarisation between white and black,33 and launched a powerful critique of white liberalism, activists from different intellectual positions maintained a dialogue in spaces such as the Beatrice Street offices. Although the apartheid state made efficient use of space as a dividing factor to create distinct ethnic identities, what Jennifer Robinson calls the ‘power of apartheid’,34 alternative cosmopolitan spaces remained, which hearkened back to a more fluid, pre-apartheid South African 10 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS past, epitomised by , and ‘isolated pockets’ in cities across the country.35 In spaces such as Beatrice Street distinct trajectories coalesced. At the University of Natal black section/medical school in the city of Durban; at the University of the North, Turfloop; in Cape Town at the Abe Bailey Institute and at the Christian Institute’s ecumenical centre at Mowbray; and in Johannesburg at the Christian Institute headquarters at Diakonia House and in Jorissen Street, trajectories juxtaposed to form an ideological ecumenism that found ways, in practice, to work around more rhetorically extreme standpoints. In these places, activists crossed ideological boundaries and ensured that debate continued, even when Black Consciousness activists paradoxically asserted the necessity of polarisation. Through its rhetorical challenge, Black Consciousness changed South Africa’s intellectual terrain, one element of which was forcing progressive whites to modulate their own positions. Biko’s argument with the interracial meetings organised by liberals was that they acted as a panacea; the meetings soothed the conscience of the white liberal and encouraged the black person to believe that they were worthwhile and equal, but did not generate any political momentum. But Biko’s critique of, and the attack of SASO on, white liberal politics also opened a possibility for the start of real dialogue, provided white liberals were strong and committed enough to re- evaluate their moral and political standpoints and provided black people were frank and willing to assert their points of view. Viewing the 1970s through the lens of the polarised rhetoric of Black Consciousness obscures moments of meaningful interaction and their consequences. This book looks to rectify the assumptions of rigid separation (itself a reflection of high apartheid) and to argue that the rhetorical radicalism of Black Consciousness stimulated the search for a new model of political change for South Africa. This book foregrounds a collection of collaborative moments in which South Africans were challenged, shaped and moulded. Activists searched for intellectual precedents and were willing to discard fruitless paradigms to accept a radical vision of a future truly democratic South African society. This book therefore explores the ‘grounds’ as well as the ‘bounds’ of the possibility of Black Consciousness, as a path-breaking collection of essays initially characterised the aims of the movement, Introduction 11 with a focus on ideas as much as on people and organisations.36 To do this, this book draws on interviews with activists who were influenced by Black Consciousness and focuses on their intellectual work at the time.

Two intellectuals An additional goal of this book is to contextualise the lives of two intellectuals: Richard Turner and Steve Biko. Their relationship functions as a motif for the argument. They were the foremost opposition public intellectuals of their generation, prepared to radically rethink the terms of the struggle against apartheid and to re-examine the fundamental premises of social values and human life. Their meeting in the city of Durban in 1970 and their relationship over the following three years brought together intellectual themes of Marxism, existentialism, Africanism and utopian Christian thinking. The relationship between Biko and Turner in Durban in the early 1970s is a fascinating example of a productive intersubjectivity. Moreover, Biko and Turner’s meeting was not unique. While black and white polarisation did occur in the 1970s – for instance, with black students pulling out of NUSAS and the National Catholic Federation of Students (NCFS) and threatening to withdraw from the ecumenical University Christian Movement (UCM) – Black Consciousness activists and white liberal-radicals continued to inhabit a shared space and dialogue continued, even if the dominant message was the need for black people to ‘go it alone’. Part of the reason for the legitimation of Black Consciousness in activist circles was that Biko was a successful advocate for its profoundly oppositional stance. Among those he directly influenced were NUSAS presidents Neville Curtis and Duncan Innes. Beyers Naudé, the founding and leading member of the ecumenical Christian Institute, was particularly impressed and influenced by Biko. Donald Woods is the most publicised case. At the time he was an influential liberal editor of the Daily Dispatch based in Port Elizabeth and his relationship with Biko was poignantly portrayed in Richard Attenborough’s film Cry Freedom (1987). The hard edge of the ideological attack of Black Consciousness was tempered by Biko’s own pragmatic stance, by SASO members’ close links with the ecumenical movement and the parallel development of Black Theology, and by its sympathetic liberal/ 12 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS radical interpreters who benefited from SASO’s own determination to publicise its ideas with regular newsletters and communiqués. The continued engagement by Black Consciousness activists in public life, the practical expression of Black Consciousness through its community development programmes, such as the Zanempilo Health Centre in the homeland, and sympathetic allies, such as Father Aelred Stubbs, all contributed to a movement that succeeded in outgrowing its intellectual birthplace in the black universities. With the murder of Biko in 1977, and the banning of Black Consciousness organisations in the same year, the state crushed the ideological ecumenism that this book examines. What remained of Black Consciousness lacked the broad-based support it commanded from 1969 to 1977 since the social and political context had changed. The rhetorical critique remained in the form of Biko’s incisive political analysis of South Africa, but the discourse sorely lacked the cocoon of progressive political organisations and individuals, as well as the personal contacts within the ecumenical movement and with radical students.

The awareness of space In a comment on the dominance of social history in South Africa’s historiography, Robinson has challenged scholars to be explicit about the ‘theoretical implications’ of their study and the need to ‘confront’ the ‘conceptual frameworks’ that work ‘silently to support apparently factual historical narratives’.37 Seeking to respond to Robinson’s challenge, this book incorporates and reflects critically upon ‘the spatial imagination’ of history, the historical importance of place, trajectories and circuits of ideas and people.38 Conceived of in these terms, ‘place’ is a dynamic sum of constitutive individuals and ideas, a conceptualisation that lays more emphasis on historical agency, while still recognising the structural relationships that constrain and bring ‘place’ about. Recent scholarship has emphasised the way in which time and space should be theorised as intimately entwined. In seeking to correct a tendency to see space as the unchanging conceptual correlative to a dynamic ‘time’, new scholarship calls for time and space to be ‘thought together’. Thus ‘it means that the imagination of one will have repercussions . . . for the imagination of the other and that space and Introduction 13 time are implicated in each other’.39 Doreen Massey argues that space needs to be recognised as ‘the product of interrelations; as constituted through interactions’. Space is ‘the sphere in which distinct trajectories coexist’ and is ‘always under construction . . . It is never finished; never closed.’40 In this regard, this book poses the question of how Black Consciousness constituted and created space in distinct settings in South Africa in the late 1960s and 1970s. The question can also be fruitfully inverted: to pose the influence of place on the development of Black Consciousness discourse. The relationship between discourse and the politics of place has stimulated fresh and original research into the history of science. In Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (2003), David Livingstone shows how the scientific revolution in Europe – for instance, the reception of Copernican theory – was experienced very differently, depending on local or national traditions that governed patronage and filtered what was deemed to be credible as science. Livingstone argues that ‘spaces of discursive exchange’ are ‘not simply about agreement; they define what kinds of disagreements are pertinent and can be expressed’.41 Rationality is rooted to a context and conversely context is also a product of shared rationality. Shared rationality underlay philosophical as well as scientific innovation. Randall Collins has emphasised the importance of sociology in his study of the history of philosophy, emphasising the ‘considerable extent’ to which it can be equated with ‘the history of groups’, ‘groups of friends, discussion partners, close-knit circles that often have the characteristics of social movements’.42 Collins provides useful concepts for this book, particularly his emphasis on ‘intergenerational chains’ for intellectual creativity and the pervasiveness of ‘intellectual fields of structural rivalry’. Philosophers, he notes, appear in ‘pairs or trios, rival positions developing contemporaneously with one another’.43 Whereas it would be naive to draw too hasty a parallel between this broad historical pattern and the relationship between activists in South Africa, Collins’s study provides a compelling and useful methodology that links sociology to intellectual history.

Three trajectories Although resonant of the earlier Africanism of the Pan Africanist Congress, which prioritised the inalienable and prior claim of Africans 14 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS to Africa, Black Consciousness was a new discourse that rested on a more sophisticated political analysis of South African society. Black Consciousness sought to challenge both the physical system of white racism and the psychological dimensions of a crippling inferiority complex among black people as a consequence of that system. In his definition of Black Consciousness, Biko prioritised the importance of a ‘mental attitude’ and discounted ‘pigmentation’ as being constitutive of the desired black identity.44 Black Consciousness was to be ‘an attitude of mind, a way of life’,45 an assertion of black dignity and humanity, which demanded active involvement in the struggle for liberation. This was a project whereby those people historically discriminated against on the basis of their skin colour reclaimed what had been lost in terms of their culture, religion, economics and education. Black Consciousness was, according to Biko, a ‘phenomenon’ of the ‘Third World’, which sought to respond to the brutalising effects of European colonialism.46 It challenged classical theories of exploitation by showing that colonialism undermined the supposed solidarity of the proletariat. By prioritising the historical experience of discrimination on the basis of race, Black Consciousness extended the definition of ‘black’ to South Africa’s minority Indian and Coloured population. Put succinctly by the SASO policy manifesto, the core of Black Consciousness was to reject the value systems that had alienated black people and affronted their human dignity.47 A second trajectory this book examines is religious thought and church politics in relation to Black Consciousness; the influence of religious thought is a point that is more broadly applicable to intellectual traditions in South Africa.48 Black Consciousness student leader and later vice chancellor of the University of South Africa, , chose to foreground the role of religion in Black Consciousness in a speech in 2007 to commemorate the death of Biko. He reminded his audience that Black Consciousness ‘began to be conceived within the womb of the religious societies and organisations’.49 The omission of religious belief, including millenarian thinking and syncretic belief systems, is a more widely representative weakness in standard accounts of African resistance, as Robert Edgar and Hilary Sapire note. As a result, ‘the wide variety of ideological and cultural strands that have been entwined in the making of modern African identities and politics remains hidden’.50 Introduction 15

A third trajectory is the New Left in South Africa. The American scholar C.R.D. Halisi remarks on the importance of the New Left in his account of black political thought in South Africa, noting the significance of their ‘generational identity’, revealed in the ideas they held about nationalism, internationalism, race relations and citizenship. Halisi raises two questions that are pertinent to this book. First, he questions what the relationship between NUSAS and SASO revealed about ‘the evolution of a transracial, generational discourse on South African citizenship’. Second, he questions the extent to which the ‘black component of the New Left’ offered an innovative perspective on racial segregation.51 The stress of this book falls on the first question, as it attempts to delineate exactly the tension, fruit and outcomes of this ‘transracial, generational discourse on South African citizenship’.

The 1970s, the hangover of high apartheid The hubris of the apartheid state played a role in creating the circumstances that made young black South Africans open to Black Consciousness. The second phase of separate development, the segregation of university education, created a uniquely primed environment where a basic tertiary education was extended to black South Africans, while at the same time frustrating their horizons. The wider educational context was the refinement of the government’s education policies, initially set out in the 1950s.52 The Extension of University Education Act of 1959 set up five university colleges: the University College of the Western Cape, for ‘Coloureds’; the University College of Durban-Westville, for ‘Indians’; the University College of Zululand, for ‘Zulus’; the University College of the North, for ‘Sotho’, ‘Tsonga’, ‘Tswana’ and ‘’ students; and the University College of Fort Hare, for ‘Xhosas’.53 The Act thus brought apartheid to bear on the universities. In 1969 the five university colleges were each granted university status, by five separate legislative enactments.54 The 1959 legislation also effectively challenged the English-speaking universities’ tradition of non-racialism and as a result provoked determined protest from NUSAS leaders, who mobilised students to defend academic freedom and university autonomy. Black students were scattered among these ‘bush’ universities and communication between the students of different universities was fraught with obstacles. Hence the immediate concern of SASO after its official launch in 1969 at the University of 16 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS the North was with the facilitation of communication among black centres. SASO formation schools also thus devoted much attention to various communication models to optimise their resources. By the end of the 1960s, the first graduates of the state’s Bantu Education tertiary system found themselves in a nominally ‘white’ South Africa. These students were trained for future leadership of the new proto-states of the ‘homelands’. The unintended consequence of Bantu Education was that it radicalised black students by attempting to offer a desiccated tertiary education with limited political horizons. This educational and professional cul-de-sac, along with intensifying repression and administrative arrogance, was a primer for revolutionary rupture. In the 1972 interview with Gerhart, Biko, by then a past president of SASO and its publications officer at the time of the interview and its most charismatic intellectual, confided that the ideas of the Movement had already taken root in the people.55 Near the end of Biko’s life, reflecting on the Soweto Uprising of June 1976, he noted that the widespread fear that had characterised the preceding decade had now disappeared, recognising ‘you are either alive or proud or you are dead . . . And your method of death can itself be a politicising thing.’ Referring to the youth who had stood up to the state, he argued, ‘so you die in the riots. For a hell of a lot of them, in fact, there’s really nothing to lose.’56 South Africa also found itself increasingly isolated as African countries began to gain independence through the 1960s. This coincided with a government crackdown after the of 21 March 1960, the launch of MK, the armed wing of the ANC, and the subsequent arrest and imprisonment on Robben Island of the top echelon of MK leaders. In the absence of visible black political parties and a subsequent vacuum of black political leadership, white liberals took up the task of voicing the concerns of blacks. This move was resented and the stage was set for young black students to take the initiative and for a new form of political engagement to emerge. The extent of this leadership vacuum has been brought into question, however, by the renewed attention given to the ANC’s underground structures in South Africa at the time.57 The decade of so-called high apartheid, in itself a problematic description, and the consolidation of the aims of separate development, the creation of ethnic ‘homelands’, was underway.58 Black Consciousness recognised this policy as an Introduction 17 attempt to fracture black solidarity and vehemently opposed it. In this context, the emphasis by activists on ‘black’ identity cut across ethnic divisions and functioned as a catch-all phrase for those oppressed by apartheid. ‘Black’ also became an affirmative statement of being, in opposition to the government’s use of the term ‘non-white’ and ‘non- European’. The term also took on added relevance as a statement of political commitment that became quickly gendered, with an emphasis on rights of the ‘black man’ in South Africa. This exclusive focus on the rights of men was obviated by women in the movement, such as Mamphela Ramphele, Deborah Matshoba and Vuyelwa Mashalaba, who appropriated ‘blackness’ to forge their own form of liberation as women.

Chapter outline This book attempts to follow a broadly chronological sweep through the years of the mid-1960s to the late 1970s in South Africa, combined with a thematic and geographical coverage of the period. In an era before the advent of the Internet, social media and in South Africa, television (only introduced in 1976), geographical distance was a notable challenge and must therefore be recognised in any analysis.59 The first chapter explores the context of the emergence of Black Consciousness through the lens of Christian networks. It points to the intimate interrelationship between missionary liberalism and the Eastern Cape, the home of Black Consciousness leaders Biko and Pityana. The chapter illustrates the importance of these Christian networks and the existence of pre-liberation theological critiques of the status quo and the role of denominational Christian societies as progressive spaces that obviated apartheid’s attempts at censorship and control. The wider role of international Christian networks is also discussed. Chapter 2 shifts the focus to the Western Cape and the relationship between the newly formed SASO and the white liberal dominated NUSAS. It examines the broader context of the book, specifically Bantu Education and the generational changes of the 1960s, and the way in which SASO sought to negotiate the tension between rejecting dialogue with white groups, on the one hand, but still maintaining their relationships with white student leaders and activists, on the other 18 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS hand. Whereas official policy rejected undue contact with white groups, Biko befriended NUSAS presidents Neville Curtis, Duncan Innes and Paul Pretorius. The chapter examines the radicalisation of NUSAS in 1971, as well as the university strikes of 1972 and the radicalisation of SASO in response to the quickened pace of banning and repression after these strikes. The third chapter situates the period’s two key intellectuals, Biko and Turner, in the politics of the ‘Durban Moment’ from 1970 to 1974. It draws attention to the significance of their interactions and its implications for a brief intermeshing of progressive philosophies in Durban, which had resonances in the public sphere of the city and the country as a whole. The Durban Strikes of 1973 and the creation of the Institute for Industrial Education are discussed. The chapter shows how a particular feature of the ‘Durban Moment’ was the close proximity of New Left and Black Consciousness activists in the city. Chapter 4 engages with the well-known critique of Black Consciousness through the lens of women’s liberation. It explores the Black Consciousness understanding of ‘liberation’ in relation to feminism that also appealed to ‘liberation’, but in a different register. The chapter argues that Black Consciousness was itself a paradoxical discourse, which sought to prescribe a place in the black struggle for women, but was simultaneously wary of the developing gender critiques and the wider cause of women’s liberation. At the same time, female activists in the Movement embodied their own particular brand of feminism. The fifth chapter explores the ‘shockwaves’ of Black Con- sciousness on the Christian Institute. It shows how the power of Black Consciousness led to a change in thinking and tactics in this organisation. It emphasises the resonances between the discourse of Black Consciousness and the struggles of black churchmen within their church hierarchies. It looks to problematise simple, one-way conceptualisations of Black Theology as an outgrowth of Black Consciousness and asserts the stand-alone importance of Black Theology, as well as the way in which both Black Consciousness and Black Theology were utilised by black churchmen to challenge the power relationships of their churches. Chapter 6 explores the defence of Black Consciousness activists in the SASO Nine trial and specifically the testimonies of Biko and Turner Introduction 19 as witnesses. It narrates the impact of state repression, the deaths of activists and the mutation of Black Consciousness into a new type of movement in the context of the 1980s and the loss of key leaders. It situates this wider conception of the impact of Black Consciousness in the months after the Soweto Uprising of June 1976. It considers the murders of Biko and Turner at the hands of the apartheid state in 1977 and 1978 respectively. The concluding chapter considers the importance of the legacies of the ideas and leaders of the 1970s and the change in their fortunes in the 1980s, as older traditions and political parties began to reassert leadership of the South African struggle, before finally examining the way in which Black Consciousness and the 1970s have been remembered in South Africa today.

Notes .H.1 M. Maserumule, ‘Why Biko’s Black Consciousness Philosophy Resonates with Youth Today’, The Conversation, 4 September 2015. https:// theconversation.com/why-bikos-black-consciousness-philosophy-resonates- with-youth-today-46909. 2. D. Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968– 1977 (Athens: Ohio University Press; Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2010); X. Mangcu, Biko: A Biography (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2012); G. Moss, The New Radicals: A Generational Memoir of the 1970s (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2014). 3. S. Hill, Biko’s Ghost: The Iconography of Black Consciousness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 4. J. Brown, The Road to Soweto: Resistance and the Uprising of 16 June 1976 (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2016). 5. L. Hadfield, Liberation and Development: Black Consciousness Community Programs in South Africa (Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 2016). 6. M.R. Maimela, ‘Black Consciousness and White Liberals in South Africa: Paradoxical Anti-apartheid Politics’, Ph.D. diss., University of South Africa, 1999. 7. J. Goodwin and J.M. Jasper, eds, The Social Movements Reader: Cases and Concepts, 2nd edition (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 3. 8. H. Sapire and J. Beall, ‘Introduction: Urban Change and Urban Studies in Southern Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies 21, no. 1 (1995): 9, 17. 20 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

. 9 J. Dlamini, Askari: A Story of Collaboration and Betrayal in the Anti-apartheid Struggle (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2015), 2. 10. I. Chipkin, Do South Africans Exist? Nationalism, Democracy and the Identity of ‘the People’ (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2007). 11. I. Chipkin, ‘The South African Nation’, Transformation, 51 (2003): 27. 12. N. Mandela, ‘Whither the Black Consciousness Movement? An Assessment’, in Reflections in Prison, ed. M. Maharaj (Cape Town: Struik, Zebra Press and Robben Island Museum, 2001), 21–64. 13. Mandela, ‘Whither the Black Consciousness Movement?’, 39. 14. Mandela, ‘Whither the Black Consciousness Movement?’, 40. 15. G.M. Fredrickson, Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa (New York: Open University Press, 1995). 16. My thanks to Bobby Marie for this observation, interview, Johannesburg, 15 February 2013. 17. Pravin Gordhan interview, cited in R. Suttner, The ANC Underground in South Africa to 1976: A Social and Historical Study (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2008), 67. 18. N.B. Pityana, ‘Opening Address: Reflections on 30 Years since the Death of Steve Biko: A Legacy Revisited,’ 2007 Steve Biko Lecture, University of South Africa, 12 September 2007. http://uir.unisa.ac.za/bitstream/ handle/10500/4338/Pityana.pdf?sequence=1. 19. For an engagement with this history, see H. Sapire and C. Saunders, eds, Southern African Liberation Struggles: New Local, Regional and Global perspectives (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2013). 20. B. Hirson, Year of Fire, Year of Ash: The Soweto Revolt; Roots of a Revolution? (London: Zed Press, 1979). 21. Although this symbol of defiance preceded Black Consciousness – see Mandela, ‘Whither the Black Consciousness Movement’, 47. 22. T. Moloi, ‘Bodibeng High School: Black Consciousness Philosophy and Students Demonstration, 1940s–1976’, South African Historical Journal 63, no. 1 (2011): 102–26. 23. For example, see the work of Leslie Hadfield: Liberation and Development; ‘Christian Action and Black Consciousness Community Programmes in South Africa’, Journal for the Study of Religion 23, no. 1 & 2 (2010): 105–30; and ‘Biko, Black Consciousness and “the System” eZinyoka: Oral History and Black Consciousness in Practice in a Rural Ciskei Village’, South African Historical Journal 62, no. 1 (March 2010): 78–99. 24. B. Pityana, ‘Letter to President J.G. Zuma by Revd Canon Barney Pityana’. http:// tcn.org.za/letter-to-president-jg-zuma-by-revd-canon-barney-pityana/. 25. H.K. Tafira,Black Nationalist Thought in South Africa: The Persistence of an Idea of Liberation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Introduction 21

26. Jackie Shandu, telephone interview with author, 18 February 2014. 27. T. Reddy, ‘Black Consciousness in Contemporary South African Politics’, in State of the Nation: South Africa 2008, ed. P. Kagwanja and K. Kondlo (Pretoria: HSRC Press, 2009), 84–103. 28. G.M. Gerhart, ‘Interview with Steve Biko’, in Biko Lives! Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko, ed. A. Mngxitama, A. Alexander and N.C. Gibson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 26. 29. Gerhart, ‘Interview with Steve Biko’, 26. 30. See the volumes from the South African Democracy Education Trust: The Road to Democracy in South Africa: Volume 1 (1960–1970) (Cape Town: Zebra Press, 2004); The Road to Democracy in South Africa: Volume 2 (1970–1980) (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2006); The Road to Democracy in South Africa: Volume 3 (International Solidarity) (Pretoria: UNISA Press; New York: Tsehai Publishers, 2008); The Road to Democracy in South Africa: Volume 4 (1980–1990) (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2010). 31. A. Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958–c.1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 32. S. Nolutshungu, Changing South Africa: Political Considerations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), 147. 33. I use the term ‘black’ to describe the historically marginalised and oppressed groups in South Africa under segregation and apartheid, namely African, Coloured and Indian and minority groups oppressed on the basis of race or ethnicity. 34. J. Robinson, The Power of Apartheid (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1996). 35. Sapire and Beall, ‘Introduction’, 9. 36. B. Pityana, M. Ramphele, M. Mpumlwana and L. Wilson, eds, Bounds of Possibility: The Legacy of Steve Biko and Black Consciousness (Cape Town: David Philip, 1991). 37. J. Robinson, ‘(Dis)locating Historical Narrative: Writing, Space and Gender in South African Social History’, South African Historical Journal 30, no. 1 (1994): 146. 38. A. Lester, ‘Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the British Empire’, History Compass 4, no. 1 (2006): 124–41. 39. D. Massey, For Space (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2005), 18. 40. Massey, For Space, 9. 41. D. Livingstone, Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 7. 42. R. Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998), 3. My thanks to Richard Pithouse for pointing me to this source. 22 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

43. Collins, Sociology of Philosophies, 5–6. 44. S. Biko, (Johannesburg: Picador Africa, 2004), 52. 45. ‘SASO Policy Manifesto’, SASO Newsletter 1, no. 3 (August 1971): 10. http:// www.aluka.org/struggles/collection/PSAPRC. 46. Biko, I Write, 53. 47. ‘SASO Policy Manifesto’, 11. 48. P. Vale, L. Hamilton and E.H. Prinsloo, eds, Intellectual Traditions in South Africa: Ideas, Individuals and Institutions (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu- Natal Press, 2014). 49. D. Accone, ‘The Legacy of Steve Biko’, Mail & Guardian Online, 6 July 2007. http://www.mg.co.za/article/2007-07-06-the-legacy-of-steve-biko. 50. R. Edgar and H. Sapire, African Apocalypse: The Story of Nontetha Nkwenkwe, a Twentieth-Century South African Prophet (Athens: Ohio University Press; Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2000), xxii. 51. C.R.D. Halisi, Black Political Thought in the Making of South African Democracy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 106. 52. P. Kallaway, ed., The History of Education under Apartheid, 1948–1994: The Doors of Learning and Culture Shall be Opened (Cape Town: Longman, 2002). 53. G.M. Nkondo, ed., Turfloop Testimony: The Dilemma of a Black University in South Africa (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1976), 2. 54. D. Welsh, ‘Some Political and Social Determinants of the Academic Environment’, in Student Perspectives on South Africa, ed. H. van der Merwe and D. Welsh (Cape Town: David Philip, 1972), 33. 55. Gerhart, ‘Interview with Steve Biko’, 37. 56. Cited in L. Wilson, Steve Biko: A Jacana Pocket Biography (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2011), 145. 57. Suttner, ANC Underground. 58. The premises of the idea of ‘high apartheid’, a period where the system was all powerful, are now being scrutinised to show the fractures in the system, even at its ‘highest’ stage – for example, at the Rethinking Apartheid’s Golden Age: South Africa, c.1966–1979 colloquium at the University of Pretoria, 20 June 2016. For the broad histories of this decade, see South African Democracy Education Trust, The Road to Democracy in South Africa: Volume 1 and The Road to Democracy in South Africa: Volume 2, and T.G. Karis and G.M. Gerhart, eds, From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa 1882–1990, Volume 5: Nadir and Resurgence, 1964–1979 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). 59. I owe this point to Foszia Turner-Stylianou, interview, Johannesburg, 22 November 2014. The Christian Roots of Black Consciousness 23

Chapter 1

The Christian Roots of Black Consciousness

We are aware of the terrible role played by our education and religion in creating amongst us a false understanding of ourselves. We must therefore work out schemes not only to correct this, but further to be our own authorities rather than wait to be interpreted by others. ––– Steve Biko, I Write What I Like

n the wake of the Second World War, African intellectuals, Ireturning soldiers and ‘subjects’ gathered to demand independence throughout Africa.1 The Year of Africa in 1960 created a mood of nervous expectancy in South Africa, but stood in stark contrast to repression within the country. The Sharpeville Massacre of 21 March 1960 sparked international outcry. The march organised by the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) to protest against the imposition of passes on Africans converged on the police station at Sharpeville. The police opened fire on the crowd of approximately 5 000 people and killed 69 unarmed protesters, including women and children, and wounded 180. The government responded to the crisis by declaring a state of emergency on 31 March 1960, effective for one year, which allowed for indefinite detentions and the seizure of perceived subversive publications, among other measures.2 The state also banned the African National Congress (ANC) and the PAC, signalling the National Party government’s determination to crush political resistance.3 The World Council of Churches responded to the Sharpeville crisis by bypassing the Christian Council of South Africa (CCSA) and calling for a direct consultation with the South African member churches,

23 24 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS to be held at Cottesloe, Johannesburg, from 7 to 14 December 1960. After a week of discussion, the final statement explicitly rejected the premises of apartheid, acknowledging South Africa as a unitary country and recognising the rights of all its inhabitants. In the words of the final declaration, the delegates recognised that ‘all racial groups who permanently inhabit our country . . . have an equal right to make their contribution towards the enrichment of the life of their country’.4 The government quickly called the Dutch Reformed churches, predominantly representing white Afrikaners, to heel and moved to crush political dissenters. Despite the Afrikaans churches retracting their initial support, Cottesloe helped to keep alive a vision of an alternative for South Africa’s future that would be pursued by the individuals and organisations explored in this book. These ecumenical developments were to provide a critical context for Black Consciousness leaders, as they created a nexus of organisations uniquely open to the ethical and political arguments put across by these leaders. The and the life imprisonment of the top echelon of ANC leaders on Robben Island in 1964 was a triumph in the National Party government’s eyes. Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd’s vision of a refined policy of apartheid, in the form of separate development, sought to mediate the change sweeping the African continent with a controlled and manipulated form of limited power devolution to the ethnic ‘homelands’, what the historian Laura Evans refers to as a ‘policy of mimicry . . . that would “modernise” existing patterns of segregation through the development of ethnic national units in which black South Africans might exercise “democratic” rights and “national sovereignty” ’.5 It was in response to this strategy of divide and rule, which young Black Consciousness activists resolutely opposed, that they sought to generate a solidarity of ‘blacks’, those discriminated against on the basis of apartheid law, people it classified as ‘non- European’. This chapter introduces the wider context of the emergence of Black Consciousness in the interstices of the 1960s ecumenical movement, the history of mission education and religious radicalism among students.6 Whereas the 1960s have been characterised as a temporary nadir in the opposition to apartheid, the decade should rather be characterised as a period of reorganisation and reflection The Christian Roots of Black Consciousness 25 among activists. To substantiate this claim, in this chapter I explore the significance of a network of committed Christian students, who drew on the ‘radical imperative’ of Christian scripture and began fashioning a moral and theological response and alternative to apartheid.7 The chapter emphasises these relationships and asserts their importance for the early Black Consciousness Movement as spaces that helped to obviate apartheid censorship and argues that Christian students were interlocutors, receptive to the ideas of Black Consciousness, but at the same time subjecting the ideas to critique. It seeks to show how Christian student networks incubated progressive ideas under apartheid and facilitated the creation of a vital network of black and white activists who maintained contact after the emergence of Black Consciousness. Christian student organisations were one small avenue in which ideas could germinate, ideas that were radical in comparison with the social conservatism apartheid planners wished to inculcate. These groups also provided organisational models that the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) was able to use for its own structures. The chapter begins with the context of apartheid’s education policies and then describes the Christian student organisations of the 1960s.

Apartheid and education The contours of apartheid education were shaped by government education policies set out in the 1950s. 8 While deeply racist and designed to inculcate a mentality of perpetual servitude, Bantu Education extended a basic education to a greater proportion of the African population than had been possible under the failing mission- based schools of the Anglican, Methodist and Catholic churches. The short-term goal of the state’s new education scheme was thus to replace the mission-based control of African education, to reassert the government’s hegemony over its black subjects and to achieve the acquiescence of the black working class.9 As the sociologist Jonathan Hyslop shows, the policy sought to defuse the political opposition that had coalesced during the Second World War, with a view to establishing ideological control after the mass urbanisation caused by the boom in secondary industry during the Second World War and the intensification of rural poverty.10 As well as a counter to South Africa’s radical welfare reforms of the 1940s, the new education policy aimed 26 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS to constrain the ‘potentially explosive needs of urban youth’ and the aspirations of their parents for a better future for their children.11 Bantu Education owed its genesis to older debates dating from the segregationist moment of the 1920s and 1930s.12 The education policy was conceived in relation to the so-called native question, about how to address the demographic majority of Africans in the Union.13 The historian Adam Ashforth describes the ‘native question’ as ‘the intellectual domain in which the knowledge, strategies, policies, and justifications necessary to the maintenance of domination were fashioned’.14 The policy of Bantu Education was central to the ideology of apartheid. Dr Werner Eiselen, the ‘Stellenbosch anthropologist- turned-native administrator’ and son of a Berlin Society missionary, was its key ideologue and the principal author of the Eiselen Report of 1951.15 Historian Cynthia Kros argues that the significance of the Eiselen Report was its systematic articulation of the ideology of apart- heid at a time when the National Party was still finding its feet in government and its vision of a new social order that would be achieved through massive state intervention. Bantu Education was central to the Nationalist attempt to provide ideological legitimation for apartheid, but was also ‘the expression of a plan to reconstitute the state’, functioning as a linchpin of apartheid planning rather than merely an educational afterthought.16 In practice Bantu Education was a ‘travesty’, as the state refused to invest the resources Eiselen recommended.17 But the extension of a basic education did contribute to rising levels of literacy among Africans during the 1950s and 1960s. In addition, as noted in the introduction, the apartheid government saw fit to establish university colleges, which had been granted university status in 1969, to provide bureaucrats for the new homeland system. This major expansion of education, together with the already existing contribution of missionary education, facilitated the growth of a ‘nascent intellectual elite attuned to the ideas and norms of the wider world’,18 part of what Archie Dick has called the ‘hidden history’ of South Africa’s book and reading cultures.19 A substantial newspaper readership developed, allowing readers to engage with international political developments, and, in particular, the quickened pace of decolonisation in Africa. Black Consciousness developed in the context of this burgeoning African petit bourgeoisie.20 Craig Charney develops the point further, arguing that apartheid’s ‘clientelist’ The Christian Roots of Black Consciousness 27 state operated through an assortment of black middlemen and, as a result, ‘at the local level the South African state was to a considerable extent colonized by a strong black civil society, a relationship that let it function and enjoy some legitimacy’.21 It was in this context that it becomes apparent that the apartheid government’s calculations for divide and rule through limited education and its clientelist structure backfired, in the government’s underestimation of the determination of black South Africans to achieve complete, national liberation.

Christian student networks in the 1960s As the National Party moved to consolidate its grip on power after the Sharpeville Massacre and implemented its policy of separate development, the opposition to apartheid splintered. Some liberals, the ANC and the PAC turned to violence, a choice that while having symbolic significance as a sign of overt resistance, in the end played into the hands of the state and had deleterious consequences for above-ground resistance to apartheid.22 Black South Africans were left without political leaders in the 1960s as they either escaped South Africa for exile or were imprisoned on Robben Island. A group of liberals turned radical ‘mavericks’ and ‘heretics’, who had been arrested in the government’s clampdown after Sharpeville, formed the National Committee for Liberation, later renamed the African Resistance Movement (ARM) in 1964.23 They conducted a short campaign in which they engaged in acts of sabotage of state property. After the chance discovery of a training manual on the use of explosives in the room of the former president of the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), Adrian Leftwich, on 4 July 1964, Leftwich was detained. He quickly turned state witness to avoid interrogation and prosecution and provided the names of ARM members, leading to their arrest.24 While Leftwich was being held, a fringe member of the organisation, schoolteacher John Harris, placed a bomb at Johannesburg’s Park Station, which led to the death of an elderly woman, badly burnt her granddaughter and injured more than twenty others. Harris was quickly arrested, tried and hanged on 1 April 1965. After a traumatic public trial of ARM members, the judge handed down harsh prison sentences to the accused and Leftwich was allowed to leave the country in 1965, at this point a broken man. Although a 28 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS complete tragedy, the ARM was a profound lesson for the white liberal generation that followed, leading them to look for alternative means to violence to bring about change in South Africa. In the aftermath of the ARM, the Rivonia trial and subsequent imprisonment of Mandela and his comrades, and the apparent supremacy of the apartheid state, student Christian organisations took on significance as a small avenue that connected students to the outside world and laid the basis for a network of activists who were committed to social change. Three such organisations that are closely examined here were the Anglican Students’ Federation (ASF), the National Catholic Federation of Students (NCFS) and the University Christian Movement (UCM). By 1964 the ASF and NCFS had a ‘significant presence’ on most of the segregated university campuses.25 Anglican theology students had set up the ASF in 1960, with the purpose of seeking ‘justice and equality both within the Church and South African society as a whole’. They intended the ASF to operate as ‘a forum where students of different races, tribes and cultural backgrounds’ could come ‘together with a common vision to fight social injustice, racism and discrimination’.26 The NCFS was founded before the Second World War as an association of university chaplaincies and then ‘re-established by returning ex-servicemen’ following the conclusion of the war.27 While in both the Anglican and Catholic churches most whites implicitly endorsed the status quo, rejecting apartheid as an ideology, but enjoying the benefits it accorded them, involvement in student organisations allowed students the opportunity to come into contact with black South Africans on a basis approaching normality. Such encounters with black students ‘challenged [white students’] assumptions and helped them form personal bonds of friendship with young black intellectuals’, the result of which was that many of these white students first began to question apartheid.28 One such student was Anne Hope, who joined the NCFS in the 1950s as a student at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, where the NCFS’s strong social awareness made her aware of ‘issues of justice in South Africa’.29 This exposure, as well as her later involvement in the Catholic student movement Pax Romana while she was studying at Oxford, led Hope to join the Grail Movement in 1957 and to train in Christian Education and Leadership The Christian Roots of Black Consciousness 29

Training (CELT),30 which she later used to introduce Steve Biko and other Black Consciousness leaders to the radical pedagogy of Paulo Freire in 1972.31 An example such as this powerfully illuminates the argument of this chapter, where an individual like Hope was exposed to progressive ideas in the 1950s and returned to offer a supportive role to Biko and Black Consciousness in the 1970s. The social awareness of both the NCFS and the ASF was facilitated by their university chaplains. The NCFS had an iconoclast as its national chaplain during the mid-1950s. Franciscan friar Didacus Connery, or Diego as he was widely known to students and fellow priests, had a ‘very advanced vision of the church’ and he challenged Catholic students to reflect critically on theology in the light of the political situation.32 In a way that anticipated the search for ‘relevance’ in the late 1960s, Connery drew connections between ‘theology and literature, encouraged liturgical reforms in Masses’ and helped students to see the relationship between ‘the Catholic faith and existentialism, psychology and ethics’. Unlike those who followed him in the 1960s, Connery only took innovation so far and remained firmly within the church, although together with the NCFS, ‘they often pushed themselves as far as possible to the limits of orthodoxy, as it was then understood’. An indication of the role played by the ASF and NCFS is evident in an article published in 1963 in the ASF newsletter. Liberal student leader Francis Wilson drew on avant-garde European theology and philosophy in an article titled ‘Les Mains Sales’. Together with David Welsh, Wilson had formed the Student Radical Association at the University of Cape Town in 1961, which was not radical, but named as such because of the ‘bias against the term “liberal” ’ at the time.33 Translated as ‘Dirty Hands’, Wilson’s title was taken from Jean-Paul Sartre’s play, which dealt ‘with the conflict, in the mind of an idealistic young Communist, between his conscience and the decisions which his political involvement forces him to make’.34 Wilson drew on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran theologian and pastor martyred by the Nazis in 1945. He regarded Bonhoeffer’s posthumously published Letters and Papers from Prison to be ‘a must for any Christian student body’. As he explained, Bonhoeffer contended that God had been ‘pushed to the edges of life’. Religion was no longer a necessary hypothesis for explaining the mysteries of life, which modern technology 30 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS had increasingly uncovered. The world had ‘come of age’. Wilson’s comments reflected the influence of new currents of thought that emphasised the secular dimensions of Christianity. The Anglican Bishop of Woolwich, John Robinson, popularised the work of Bonhoeffer through his book Honest to God, published in 1963. Bonhoeffer’s personal story of a young theologian who stood against the Third Reich and chose to join the assassination plot to eliminate Adolf Hitler was powerfully evocative. Wider afield, theology students grappled with the work of the Harvard theologian Harvey Cox, who published The Secular City in 1965, and Paul van Buren who had stimulated the so-called God is Dead debate and popularised a ‘secular theology’.35 Through his intervention, Wilson sought to bring his readers into the spirit of this theological debate, which affirmed a political dimension to faith. Through Bonhoeffer and Sartre, he intended to awaken students to their broader responsibilities. For Wilson, the Church needed to be, following the former Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, ‘an expeditionary force’.36 It was such thinking that led Christians to take on secular responsibilities within the ambit of the spiritual. The choice of NCFS’s newsletter title, Katutura, was a bold statement itself. A Herero word that translates as ‘We have no permanent resting place here’,37 the name was shared by a township of forcibly removed refugees, dumped by the South African government outside Windhoek in South West Africa, now Namibia. The title thus implied solidarity with that country’s struggle for independence. In 1969 the United Nations Security Council had condemned South Africa for ‘maintaining illegal control over South West Africa in defiance of the United Nations’.38 The title also conveyed the newsletter’s aim of unsettling readers. Editor Des Barry sketched out Katutura’s aims as fourfold: to disseminate ‘new and radical ideas in order to get people thinking along new lines’; to help readers to clarify their personal positions on ‘pertinent issues’; to suggest ‘realistic ways in which people can work for positive change in the church and society’, as well as ‘personal change’; and importantly, to ‘prompt action for change’.39 These aims were encapsulated in the title, as Barry explained: Katutura entailed ‘a demanding realization . . . there is no abiding place of rest in the present order’.40 It is evident how the aims of Katutura were at direct odds with the objectives of apartheid, which sought to censor the world of ideas South Africans could be The Christian Roots of Black Consciousness 31 exposed to. In contrast to what apartheid censors looked to achieve, the editors of Katutura were eclectic consumers of international ideas, like their secular student counterparts. The presence of the ASF and the NCFS on the black campuses and the protection and communication it offered black students between campuses were significant in the context of a closing down of avenues for expression, free thought and censorship. It was such organisations, which lacked the allure of revolutionary movements, but nonetheless played a small part as an avenue for progressive thought, as should become clearer further into our discussion. This became particularly relevant after 1965. One additional source of support came from a progressive group of Afrikaner professionals. In May 1962, a handful of leading Afrikaans professionals and clerics, including Beyers Naudé, Albert Geyser, Fred van Wyk, Ben Engelbrecht and Bruckner de Villiers had established a monthly bilingual (Afrikaans and English) ecumenical newsletter, called Pro Veritate (For the Truth), which they intended to use as a platform to discuss societal problems in the light of scripture.41 Among these issues, the ‘problem of race and colour relations’ was deemed to loom largest.42 The editorial staff included one Coloured and one African minister ‘as proof of the sincere desire and the urgent need that the voice of our non-White (sic) Christians should also be heard’. The opening article of the newsletter set the tone clearly and argued that there could be biblical justification for only one form of apartheid, the separation between believers and unbelievers. In the same year that Wilson published his article, Naudé and a significantly smaller group of Dutch Reformed Church clergy founded the Christian Institute in August 1963 to pursue the original vision briefly captured at the Cottesloe conference in 1960. Following his public resignation in March 1963 from the Broederbond, the secret Afrikaans organisation founded in 1918, Naudé was forced to choose between being director of the Christian Institute and his position as moderator of the Southern Transvaal synod of the Dutch Reformed Church. He chose to resign as moderator and take up the position of director. These moves, together with his perceived betrayal of the Broederbond, set Naudé up as a prime target for a torrent of hatred from the Afrikaner establishment that was to last until at least the 1980s. 32 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

Black Consciousness leaders in South Africa’s ‘liberal missionary heartland’ In a sense, Biko, Barney Pityana and the other early leaders of SASO were primed to be open to Christian organisations. Christianity loomed large in the early life of both men, with all its complications in a colonial context. This was particularly so for the Eastern Cape, where Biko and Pityana were born, most recently evoked by Biko’s biographer, the public intellectual Xolela Mangcu.43 Pityana later recalled:

The Eastern Cape was my frame of reference in my formative years. It was that region where I received my schooling and the beginnings of my tertiary education, where my love for learning was born and firmly established, and where my passion for freedom, including intellectual and academic freedom was born.44

In the Eastern Cape there were also deep historical memories of Xhosa resistance to settler encroachment,45 as well as the legacies of powerful millenarian movements such as the Israelites, members of which had been massacred by the Smuts government at Bulhoek in May 1921.46 The imprint of more than a century of missionary endeavour led church historian David Thomas to call the region South Africa’s ‘liberal missionary heartland’, as showcased by the prestigious institutions of Lovedale and Fort Hare College.47 Leaders such as , Z.K. Matthews, and Nelson Mandela had passed through these institutions.48 Thomas estimates that by 1970 two-thirds of Africans had converted to Christianity. This he sees to be the fruit of the preceding 50 years, during which the Anglican and Methodist churches had consolidated their presence in urban areas and their dominance of mission schools.49 Pityana hailed from Port Elizabeth. Biko was born in 1946 in Tarkastad and grew up in the Ginsberg location near King William’s Town. Their friendship began at school – they shared a desk at the Lovedale mission school,50 situated at Alice in the Eastern Cape and originally founded by the Glasgow Missionary Society. In 1963 Biko was expelled after being detained by the police, along with his brother Khaya, for suspected connections with the PAC armed wing Poqo. The Christian Roots of Black Consciousness 33

Steve was soon released, but Khaya ‘disappeared’ for ten months, was charged and then acquitted on appeal.51 Steve Biko’s detention by the police and his unfair dismissal from Lovedale was ‘a very bitter experience’, which laid the seeds of an abiding antipathy to authority.52 Pityana was also expelled from the school in 1964 for taking part in a student strike. These early experiences highlighted the harsh limits to tolerance in the mission school context and partly help to explain the later hostility of Biko to missionary education. In 1964, after missing an entire school year, Biko moved to the Catholic St Francis College, situated at the Mariannhill Mission near Pinetown, in what was then Natal. Established in 1882 by Francis (Wendolin) Pfanner, the Mariannhill Mission was a historic centre of African theatre. As described by the literary scholar Bhekizizwe Peterson, the dominant intellectual ideas at Mariannhill presented ‘civilisation’, a conflation of ‘Christianity and imperialism’, ‘as normative models and the ideal negations of African “primitiveness”, “paganism”, “savagery” ’ and other deviant traits supposedly associated with African culture.53 Such negative perceptions of African culture were foundational for St Francis College and appeared to have scarcely changed by the time Biko arrived. He responded by openly challenging his tutors on Catholic doctrine,54 as well as fighting ‘many wars’ with the school authorities.55 In later life Biko commented on the deleterious effects of a Eurocentric curriculum: ‘No wonder the African child learns to hate his heritage in his days at school. So negative is the image presented to him that he tends to find solace only in close identification with the white society.’56 Biko considered this education to be based on what he called ‘the rotten foundation’, which the bulk of the missionaries had ‘created when they came’. In contrast to Biko’s open questioning of orthodox Christian belief, Pityana remained a ‘deeply committed Christian’, as well as a member of the Anglican Church,57 for which he was later nicknamed ‘Bishop’ by his Black Consciousness comrades.58 Both Biko and Pityana had been members of the ASF and, after Biko’s expulsion from Lovedale, they were able to meet again at an ASF conference at the private boys’ school Michaelhouse in the Natal Midlands.59 Their involvement also enabled the two young students to make early contact with Bishop Denis Hurley, the Catholic Archbishop 34 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS of Durban. One of the original participants in the Second Vatican Council, Hurley was an outspoken critic of apartheid and an active, if hidden, supporter of progressive individuals.60 Pityana maintained his links with the ASF after the formation of SASO, served as its president in 1970 and attended ASF conferences in the same year.61 Biko’s open criticism of missionaries and Christianity sat paradoxically alongside the prominent role a missionary, of a type, played in his life. While at St Francis College as a young high school student, Biko wrote to Father Aelred Stubbs. Stubbs served as principal of the Anglican seminary for black students at St Peter’s College, at the Federal Theological Seminary, based in Alice. Born in England in 1923 and educated at Eton and Oxford University, Stubbs had joined the Community of the Resurrection, an Anglican monastic order, in 1954 and was then sent to South Africa in 1960 to become principal of St Peter’s College, the Anglican seminary for black ordinands at Rosettenville, just outside Johannesburg.62 When the college was forced to relocate to Alice in the Eastern Cape, it became part of the new Federal Theological Seminary of Southern Africa in 1963. Stubbs had initially come across the Biko family as part of his pastoral work in the Ginsberg location at the time of the brothers’ arrest. Stubbs felt obliged to arrange legal defence for the boys and gave evidence on behalf of Khaya and pleaded for mitigation of his sentence. In either 1964 or 1965, he then received a ‘very long letter’ from Steve, who introduced himself as Khaya’s brother, after which ‘he launched into a series of long questions about the Christian faith’,63 expressing particular difficulty with ideas such as the Virgin birth of Christ. Stubbs became a close friend to both Biko and Pityana, beginning what he would later call ‘a kind of personal ministry to various persons in different parts of the country who are under banning and/or house arrest restriction orders’.64 A historian of the Community of the Resurrection, Alan Wilkinson, explains some of the reasons for this affinity by pointing to the similar positions of activists and monastic Christians like Stubbs, ‘who by their calling are also standing against the norms of both society and church’.65 Individuals like Stubbs were to provide part of the white intellectual orbit with which Biko and SASO leaders interacted. The Christian Roots of Black Consciousness 35

The founding of the UCM and the birth of SASO It was the irreconcilable tensions created within the umbrella body of South African Christian student organisations, the Student Christian Association (SCA), by mounting international condemnation of apartheid that facilitated the emergence of a black-only student organisation. On 12 January 1965, ‘in a conference room in Bloem- fontein the Students’ Christian Association (SCA) was dissolved by a four-fifths majority vote of its Council’ after the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF) pressurised the SCA national leadership to take an explicit stand against apartheid.66 This was a step the South Africans had resisted and they objected to the WSCF’s undue interference. As a global ‘movement of movements’ against apartheid crystallised, as studied by Håkan Thörn and Rob Skinner,67 international bodies increasingly pressured the equivocal stance taken by some groups, such as the SCA, which led to a clarification of positions to either endorse or explicitly oppose apartheid policies. The SCA dissociated itself from the international body and splintered into racial factions. According to William Houston, who was closely involved, the ecumenical churches belonging to the CCSA had foreseen ‘the inevitable demise of the SCA’ and began preparation as early as 1963 for the SCA’s English Medium Work to affiliate to the CCSA through its youth department.68 Although a tragedy, some rightly discerned in the breakup ‘seeds of a new and dynamic witness to Christ among the students of South Africa’ for whom ‘a new dimension’ in thinking had ‘long been due’.69 As a result, there was the formation of ‘new alliances’ among young South Africans, ‘most of whom were in their twenties or early thirties’ and had been ‘shocked’ by the Sharpeville Massacre.70 These ‘new alliances’ were the seedbed from which black students could break away and launch a new and independent organisation and they provided one set of interlocutors that would stay associated with the Black Consciousness Movement throughout its development. In direct response to the breakup of the SCA, the Archbishop of Cape Town, Robert Selby-Taylor, convened a meeting of Anglican, Roman Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregational church representatives in Cape Town in November 1966 to discuss the possibility of a new student movement.71 At the meeting they resolved to make a new start and a second conference, two weeks 36 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS later, of ‘chaplains and student society leaders’ began planning for the inauguration of a new organisation. The members organised meetings in 1966, which culminated in a conference in December at Rosettenville, Johannesburg. The churches supported the formation of a new ecumenical organisation, which facilitated the ‘original thrust to form the UCM’ from the Protestants and Catholics who ‘sought to find a meaning to unity and social justice in a racially divided South Africa’. The logic that drove the meetings was a ‘fairly simple belief in a multi- racial society, a desire to bring students together to promote this end and an acceptance that this could only be done across denominational lines in an ecumenical movement’.72 The inaugural UCM conference took place in Grahamstown on 14 July 1967, with the full support of the Anglican, Methodist, Congregational and Presbyterian churches.73 They elected two white clergymen to lead the new organisation, with Colin Collins as general secretary and the Reverend Basil Moore as president. Collins was the national chaplain of the NCFS and had ‘a wide range of contacts in the black colleges’ and was part of the early negotiations.74 Born in King William’s Town in 1928 and trained as a Catholic priest in Stellenbosch and Pietermaritzburg, after being ordained Collins was sent to the University of Pretoria, at that time a bastion of . There, he encountered another priest, Didacus (Diego) Connery, who, as we have seen, was renowned for his openness to so-called avant-garde theology and art. After working for the Apostolic Delegate for Southern Africa, Collins served as general secretary of the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference (SACBC) from 1958 to 1968, as well as being chaplain to Catholic students. It was during his time with the SACBC that Collins became ‘increasingly angry with the lack of action on the part of the bishops in the struggle against apartheid’ and ‘turned to other young pastors in the Protestant churches’.75 Basil Moore was one such young Protestant pastor. He had intended to become an agricultural scientist and taught for two years, but reregistered to study divinity at Rhodes University following an ‘intense religious experience’. He returned to the university as someone ‘politicised’ and served as president of NUSAS, the national student organisation synonymous with liberal opposition to apartheid. A The Christian Roots of Black Consciousness 37 former student colleague remembered Moore as ‘deeply passionate about everything he did, whether it be intellectual, political, religious or personal’.76 Moore was an important figure at Rhodes, but was part of a wider group, including others, such as James Moulder, who ‘were developing a type of pre-liberation theology for South Africa’.77 The name ‘University Christian Movement’ had originally been coined by Moore for a group founded at Rhodes University to push forward a renewed engagement with Christianity in the light of the racial injustices of apartheid. This name was adopted by the new ecumenical student organisation. As such, the UCM consisted of ‘two streams’, one radical from the start (in the sense of the etymology, examining the roots) and the other official and church-backed. These two streams converged briefly, but the radical current soon outstripped the cautious church hierarchies.78 It was with this leadership team, a disaffected Catholic and an idealistic Methodist, perhaps foolishly, that the churches launched the UCM on its short-lived and tumultuous five-year existence. One of the reasons for the significance of the UCM was that it quickly attracted membership from black students, who grew to become the largest constituency. This sudden development was remarkable as the total number of black students in South Africa was tiny in comparison to white students (5 105 black students were enrolled in universities in 1967 compared to 67 294 white students).79 The UCM readily engaged with ‘new’ theology such as that of Cox and the so-called secular gospel, which sought to explore more fully the implications of the gospel for the social and political questions of the time. As the historian Daniel Magaziner shows, the UCM was critical for Black Consciousness and would provide a model for SASO and young black theologians to engage with what faith meant in an apartheid context, adding a vital theological component to the ideas of Black Consciousness. As UCM leaders sought to make Christianity ‘relevant’ to student culture of the 1960s, they opened a possibility for the development of what Magaziner calls a ‘political faith’ that blurred the lines of the secular and sacred.80 A striking example of the role played by the UCM was the chance it afforded Moore and two black students, Bob Kgware and Gerald Ray, to attend the annual American University Christian Movement conference in Cleveland, Ohio, in December 1967. At the conference, 38 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

Black Power speakers featured prominently. The American delegates persuaded the group to travel to New York to meet with James Cone, a rising star of another theological trend, Black Theology.81 Brought up in the Macedonia African Methodist Episcopal Churches and called to the ministry as a young man, Cone had originally aspired to be like Martin Luther King, training for the ministry at Garrett Theological Seminary in Wisconsin and graduating from Northwestern University, where he completed a doctoral degree on the theology of Karl Barth in 1965. Cone had his faith challenged to the roots, however, by the radical message of Malcolm X, a challenge that was intensified by subsequent riots in northern cities and the call of Stokely Carmichael for ‘Black Power’ in Mississippi during the Meredith March.82 Moore recalls of the meeting that he was ‘won over’ to Cone’s way of thinking, describing Cone as ‘a very charismatic individual’.83 At the meeting, Cone presented Moore with an advance copy of Black Theology and Black Power, which was to be published in 1969. Moore’s discussion with Cone and the ideas in Cone’s text stimulated him to write a paper titled ‘Towards a Black Theology’ on his return to South Africa. The visit of Moore, Kgware and Ray to the United States was a success in so far as they secured funds that allowed the UCM to hire a full- time secretary and to purchase a car. The WSCF also stepped in to provide financial assistance and by September 1969, 87 per cent of the UCM’s budget was sourced from overseas donors.84 The group’s return to South Africa was marked by tragedy, though, when Kgware was murdered under mysterious circumstances, with the security police being a prime suspect in the murder. Moore pressed on and presented his paper at UCM seminars throughout South Africa, ensuring that its impact would be as widespread as possible.85 Moore drew a direct comparison with the situation of blacks in South Africa and the Jews of Jesus’s day under Roman occupation. The question Black Theology needed to pose, Moore argued, was: ‘What message of hope did Jesus have for his contemporaries whose situation parallels that of black South Africans?’86 Moore went on to emphasise the political resonances of Jesus for the Jews, whereby his teaching aimed to provide his followers with the means to regain moral power. Moore summarised that it was only ‘where the Church stands identified’ with ‘the poor, dehumanised, The Christian Roots of Black Consciousness 39 enslaved and politically disinherited people’ that it could deserve ‘to be called the Church’.87 Moore’s essay was a self-searching exploration and elaborated a theological method that emphasised the importance of context, but it was hardly a fully formulated Black Theology. These early seminars led the UCM to launch a full-scale Black Theology Project, directed by the black Federal Theological Seminary student Sabelo Stanley Ntwasa. Moore’s role as a catalyst for Black Theology in South Africa was incidental – he provided a contact with Cone and adapted Cone’s ideas to suit the political situation at home. Reading Moore’s essay today, it is hard to see how it had such wide influence, as its method and ideas appear relatively innocuous. However, it was the context within which he was writing that rendered the essay of such import. Furthermore, he was a white Christian, who was rooted in the kind of radical Christian network described earlier. Here was a white clergyman, who brought Black Theology into South Africa, which was then taken up by black seminary students and clergymen. This kind of relationship is emblematic of the theme of this book: this was a relationship that was fraught, contradictory – the white clergyman who called for a Black Theology – but which nonetheless was historically constitutive of the discourse and resonant of the kinds of tensions and paradoxes that underpinned the relationship of Black Consciousness in South Africa to its interlocutors. The strong presence of black students in the UCM provided them with an opportunity to establish national contacts, which obviated the government’s attempts to separate them and inculcate ‘ethnic’ tribal identities. Christopher Merrett observes that censorship more broadly was used to accentuate perceived differences between races and to ‘maintain the illusion that the fine-sounding ideas of apartheid were not only desirable and moral, but realisable’.88 By circumventing such censorship and intellectual repression, organisations such as the UCM, ASF and NCFS, and individuals like Moore undermined this attempt by the apartheid state to maintain a monopoly on the ideas its citizens were exposed to. The importance of their role was heightened further by the sense of dislocation engendered by the state. Thomas Karis and Gail Gerhart emphasise that ‘the new black universities set up after 1959 were taking shape in a climate of isolation and repression, and their students were trying to reach out to one another and develop lines 40 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS of communication across the country’.89 The UCM, pooling resources of already existing networks such as that of the ASF and NCFS, provided a vital means to subvert this climate of isolation. While a student at Fort Hare, Pityana later captured some of the allure that the UCM presented, as it ‘seemed to represent something refreshingly radical: the Sunday evening “Happenings”, the new theology, worship of a different kind. Basil Moore, Jim Polley, James Moulder, Randy Falkenberg, Charles Villa-Vicencio – all Methodist theologians, were promising the new intellect, the radical vision and a courage that was sadly lacking in NUSAS.’90 The importance of the UCM as a space that allowed black students to meet each other was made most powerfully apparent in July 1968 when Pityana and Biko attended the UCM conference at Stutterheim, just north of King William’s Town in the Eastern Cape. Both men had overcome the earlier setbacks to their educational careers. Biko had enrolled at the medical school of what was then the University of Natal Non-European Section in 1966, after matriculating from St Francis College, and was thus part of an elite few who made it into the medical school. He was initially committed to multiracial liberalism, describing himself as a ‘NUSAS man’ for his first year on campus.91 At Stutterheim, this former Lovedale duo led the caucus of black student leaders that agreed to work towards a conference with a specific focus on black students to address their needs.92 The founding conference of the new black-only student organisation, SASO, took place at Biko’s Alma Mater, St Francis College, in December 1968. The following year, in July 1969, they officially launched SASO at the University of the North, Turfloop (an ethnic university set up to serve ‘Sotho’, ‘Tsonga’, ‘Tswana’ and ‘Venda’ students) and named Biko the first national president.93 The communiqué drawn up at the 1969 inaugural SASO conference identified the isolated and repressive atmosphere at the university colleges as being the key motive for SASO’s establishment, thus supporting the view of Karis and Gerhart concerning the overall state at the black university colleges: ‘For all intents and purposes, these students have remained isolated not only physically but intellectually’, the writers of the communiqué observed.94 As a result of a need to bring these students ‘more into the orbit of interaction’ and the ‘paramount The Christian Roots of Black Consciousness 41 need’ for contact between black students, the communiqué posited the creation of a black student organisation as a ‘segregated platform’ and therefore chose ‘to meet on a limited scale than not meeting at all’ to be ‘the lesser evil’.95 In response to claims by the press that SASO was ‘formed in opposition to NUSAS, or as a Black equivalent of NUSAS’, the writers rejected this and asserted that SASO was ‘simply an organisation formed to promote contact’.96 Most of the support for SASO was initially shared between the University of the North, Turfloop, and Biko’s host institution, the University of Natal Non-European Section in Durban. Turfloop was particularly important for its financial support in the first year and contributed 77 per cent of the total affiliation fees, which earned the institution special commendation in the first SASO Newsletter.97 The University of Natal Non-European Section became the headquarters of SASO and provided cheap office equipment. In contrast, SASO remained weak in the Eastern Cape and it was only when permission was granted by the rector to form a SASO branch at the University of Fort Hare, on the condition that the expelled Pityana did not ‘set his foot at Fort Hare’, that SASO could hope ‘to see a more vigorous SASO’ emerge there.98 In their choice of the name of SASO, black students were overt from the start about their rejection of the aims of separate development propounded by apartheid. By calling for a ‘South African’ students’ organisation, students maintained their awareness and hope to be full citizens of the state of South Africa. This should have sounded an early warning to the apartheid government, but SASO’s independent stance and breakaway from NUSAS for a time allayed the suspicions of the government. Although initially posited as ‘simply an organisation formed to promote contact’, SASO quickly grew to become far more. Firstly, the organisation became an intellectual hub for students seeking to make sense of their oppression and they utilised the organisation to gain access to books that sharpened their intellects. Reading lists were ironically procured from the Government Gazette’s list of banned works. Christian and liberal bookshops often provided a safe front, from which banned books could be bought from a secret ‘back section’ – for instance, a Methodist bookshop that an activist remembered in Durban in the 1970s.99 As Archie Dick has observed of South Africa 42 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS more broadly, black readers did not conform to the ‘culture that apartheid had designed for them’ and instead shared ‘the same reading diet of white South Africans and town-dwellers across the world’.100 One recollection of the way black students utilised SASO to become more widely read, is offered by Mosibudi Mangena, a student enrolled at the University of Zululand, Ngoye, who equated his involvement with SASO with intellectual exploration. Mangena recalls:

One of the immediate consequences of our involvement with SASO was a scramble for political knowledge. Apart from a host of discussion groups and seminars, there was a hunt for relevant reading material, especially the work of the Nkrumahs, Fanons, du Bois’s and so forth. The bush universities’ libraries were of no help in this regard and personal enterprise was the only way out. Friends and liberal bookshops became the more likely sources of these precious ‘jewels’.101

As is evident from Mangena’s recollections, black students linked their understanding of repression under apartheid to the broader, current and historical struggles of the black diaspora. SASO quickly served to pool these intellectual resources, enabling students to be far better informed collectively than they would have been individually, thereby overcoming the intellectual isolation that the 1969 communiqué expressed concern about. The next major event was SASO’s first General Students’ Council, from 4 to 10 July 1970, hosted at the Durban medical school. The six-day meeting was organised by Vuyelwa Mashalaba, 102 whom Mangcu describes as coming ‘from a prominent family in the . . . beautiful, classy and sophisticated’ and ‘a role model for younger female medical students such as Mamphela Ramphele’.103 The General Students’ Council had courted controversy by barring access to the press, although a motion to barring ‘all Non-Blacks from attending’ had been withdrawn and deferred for further discussion.104 The first General Students’ Council served to crystallise a number of issues, one of which was a rejection of terms such as ‘non-white’ and ‘non-European’. Although ‘non-white’ had been used in the 1969 communiqué, at the General Students’ Council SASO delegates rejected it, ‘arguing that The Christian Roots of Black Consciousness 43 people should be referred to by what they are rather than what they are not’ and preferring simple labels of ‘black’ or ‘white’.105 Further resolutions instructed the SASO executive to maintain contact with the UCM, in view of its practical projects that alleviated the effects of poverty and to consider establishing a commission on religion, in view of the support of the seminaries as members of SASO.106 The General Students’ Council also included a symposium on the topic ‘Black is Beautiful’, with M.T. Moerane, editor of The World, Madala Mphahlele, Ben Khoapa, a staff worker for the YMCA in Durban, and students from ‘UNISA [University of South Africa], Turfloop, Fort Hare and UNB [University of Natal-Black Section]’ as speakers, which the writer of the SASO Newsletter judged to be the most important part of the conference. Although the writer deemed the event to have been the most important, the only comment was offered in the September issue, where a remark made by Mphahlele that ‘people should resist the temptation of being preoccupied with defining “how black is black” ’ served as a springboard to do just that, as the writer sought to assert the importance of African, Indian and Coloured people embracing a ‘black’ identity to ensure they would ‘be working in the same direction’.107 In this context, ‘black consciousness’ was intended to ‘define one’s enemy more clearly and to broaden the base from which we are operating’. The message was thus that those oppressed by apartheid, regardless of the degree, should join ranks to oppose it. Biko’s first essay in the newsletter of August 1970 took the critique forward and laid the blame for apartheid squarely at the door of the white community as a group. The title ‘Black Souls in White Skins?’, played on the book title Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon, first published in French in 1952 and translated into English in 1967. Biko’s essay began with the striking premise that white South Africa was ‘basically . . . a homogenous community’ that occupied ‘a privileged position that they do not deserve’ and that they were aware of the fact and therefore spent ‘their time trying to justify’ their policies.108 Biko took particular aim at whites who were ‘nonconformists’ a catch-all phrase that included ‘liberals’ and ‘leftists’. Biko expressed particular ire against what he called a ‘liberal ideology . . . that the problems of the country’ could ‘only be solved by a bilateral approach involving both 44 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS black and white’. Biko dismissed this type of integration as ‘artificial’ and ‘unproductive’. In contrast, he posited ‘true integration’ as ‘the provision for each man, each group to rise and attain the envisioned self ’, a ‘mutual respect for each other and complete freedom’ that would allow for ‘a genuine fusion of the life-styles of the various groups’ to arise. It was in the context of this discussion of true integration that Biko posited the need for ‘black consciousness’, using the term for the first time, to my knowledge, as an antidote to black people’s ‘inferiority complex’ and to enable them ‘to assert themselves and stake their rightful claim’ as partners in the creation of new, truly integrated society.109 Biko’s second essay ‘We Blacks’, a month later in the September 1970 SASO Newsletter, dwelt specifically on religious themes and undertook a similar critique to that undertaken by Moore in his ‘Towards a Black Theology’. Biko emphasised the ‘spiritual poverty’ of black people, which, coupled with ‘material want . . . kills’ and creates ‘mountains of obstacles in the normal course of emancipation of the black people’.110 Biko discerned the causes to be the loss of black manhood, the denigration of black identity through a distorted, European-centred history and an inflexible and repressive application of Christianity. Biko prescribed ‘black consciousness’ as the antidote; it sought to ‘show black people the value of their own standards and outlook’, ‘to give positivity in the outlook of the black people to their problems’ and ‘to talk to the black man in a language that is his own’. Biko set out to destroy what he called the ‘anachronism of a well-meaning God who allows people to suffer continually under an obviously immoral system’, arguing that the message of the Bible needed to be reinterpreted and ‘black theology’ was the sorely needed corrective. Its purpose was to depict ‘Jesus as a fighting God who saw the exchange of Roman money – the oppressor’s coinage – in his father’s temple as so sacrilegious that it merited a violent reaction from Him – the Son of Man’.111 Here it is evident how Biko incorporated Black Theology as an integral facet of what he called ‘black consciousness’ – a fact that pointed to the success of the UCM in spreading these ideas. This endorsement of Black Theology by Biko points to its importance as a component of the overall discourse that SASO sought to develop and illustrates the significance of the deeper Christian networks that this The Christian Roots of Black Consciousness 45 chapter has tried to map out, which had facilitated the introduction of the ideas of Black Theology, via Moore, into South Africa, and then adopted by SASO. Biko’s enthusiasm for Black Theology either influenced or was simply indicative of the importance attached to it by the wider cohort of students enrolled in SASO, even though it was self-consciously ‘a secular body’, as participants recognised in its Transvaal and Natal formation schools in September 1970.112 The ‘formation school’ was a name and method borrowed from the NCFS that described a retreat setting, where participants spent an intensive period discussing issues pertinent to their lives. SASO organisers understood it to be a means to ‘allow the participants the chance of self-development through participation in discussions and other group projects’ that offered ‘training in leadership qualities’. At both events, ‘considerable time was spent discussing Black Theology and what it entails’ and participants ‘recognised the functional importance of working closely with other groups in an effort to stress the importance of this topic’.113 Although the 1970 General Students’ Council had instructed the SASO executive to maintain contact with the UCM, its multiracial approach sat uneasily with black students. The first SASO Newsletter, following a month after the General Students’ Council, discerned a lack of political direction in the organisation, a characteristic it judged to be common of ‘mixed movements’. In a comment on the UCM’s annual conference, which had taken place in July 1970 at Wilgespruit, near Johannesburg, a SASO observer dismissed the organisation’s approach as a ‘clique theology’, which was ‘far in advance of the country’s conservative Churches’, but did not impress its black members.114 The writer judged the UCM as of value only ‘in so far as it still has the machinery and manpower to make black theology’, a remark softened by the recognition of the UCM’s welfare programmes that were of ‘some value’ to the black students, ‘who comprise the majority in UCM’.115 At the July 1970 UCM conference, black students had in fact outnumbered whites by more than two to one and they seriously considered withdrawing from the UCM, which they accused of ‘nurturing Black inferiority-White superiority attitudes’, dampening black militancy and ‘denying them the chance of nurturing their Black consciousness’.116 The fact that black students had not left the UCM 46 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS may have been due to the practical projects of the UCM that the SASO General Students’ Council had noted and the endorsement of the organisation at the General Students’ Council that may have indicated a generally positive perception of the organisation for black students.

Responding to the first shockwaves The charged rhetoric of Black Consciousness powerfully impacted on the UCM and the Anglican and Catholic student organisations, but played out differently in each organisation. In a letter written on 22 June 1971, Moore observed that SASO had ‘succeeded tremendously in capturing the imagination of most African university students’, which had caused the ‘withdrawal from UCM into SASO of our most able leadership’. Moore argued that this had been ‘anticipated’, but that the shockwaves created by the appeal to ‘Black identity’ had not been similarly foreseen. This new development, Moore observed, had thrown ‘not only white but also Coloureds and Indians into a real identity crisis’, the result of which had surprisingly been ‘a renewal of and a vigorous interest in the UCM on the part of some troubled whites and Indians and Coloureds (sic)’.117 Moore observed the ways in which the UCM continued to ‘shift and change its character’, as the UCM and Black Theology had ‘moved into the black church and succeeded beyond its wildest dreams . . . black theology is so much bigger than the UCM’. In addition, the UCM adult literacy programme was growing and transforming the organisation. Moore reckoned ‘we are rapidly becoming, a Christian Adult Education Movement’, which he saw would spawn ‘new programmes’ that would ‘become semi- independent’ in the way that Black Theology had done.118 The ASF had managed to negotiate the emergence of SASO more successfully than the UCM by retaining its black students, perhaps partly because of the fact that Pityana had been made president of the ASF in the same year that students broke to form SASO, in 1968.119 He subsequently maintained correspondence with ASF representatives and attended the 1970 ASF conference.120 Unlike the UCM, which was moving away from the churches in a more radical direction, the ASF retained a close church affiliation. In a letter written in the wake of the demise of the UCM, Stephen Hayes, an Anglican priest who had been deported from South West Africa for reporting favourably on The Christian Roots of Black Consciousness 47 the Ovamboland Strikes and had been banned to the Durban area in 1972, identified the strength of the ASF as its willingness to be ‘more integrated into the life of the local church’. Hayes saw a crucial failure of the UCM in ‘its tendency to develop a self-consciously “student” style of Christianity and to divorce itself from the life of the church’.121 The emergence of SASO also drew international attention through networks that the ASF provided. Bill Johnston of New York wrote to an ASF member, Jeremy Gauntlett, asking about the emergence of SASO and its impact on the ASF.122 This example reveals the global network that was interested in the new black student movement taking shape in the bowels of apartheid. The ASF, however, also provided a platform for those who pushed back against the harder edges of SASO’s rhetorical attacks. Father Dwane, in an address to the ASF titled ‘The Church and Youth’, called for the audience to remember the special mission of the church, which steered between cultural and racial division.123 In a similar way to the manner in which the early church had overcome the division between Jew and Gentile, Dwane sought to remind his audience that ‘black and white Christians must also find time to look at each other and talk and do things together’. For the very reason that there was ‘so much pressure from white society and certain elements in black consciousness to separate,’ it was imperative for ‘young Christians to meet and remind one another about the Gospel and the true nature of the Church’. This meeting gave a new meaning to liberation, whereby blacks could liberate whites from suspicion and fear, and blacks could be liberated from ‘obsequiousness and feelings of inferiority’. Dwane placed great confidence in the goodwill of the youth and the need for overcoming ignorance, which he saw as a central reason for bad relations between white and black.124 The role of the ASF was therefore of an inherently more conservative body, with closer links to the Anglican Church and hosting individuals like Father Dwane, who flagged the need to correct some of SASO’s hardest rhetorical aspects, detected in ‘certain elements in black consciousness’. It was in the context of a desert of opportunity created under apartheid that this organisation’s small moves to a progressive standpoint, emblematic in Father Dwane’s call for liberation for blacks and whites, took on significance. The Catholic students were to take this call for liberation even further. 48 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

While the Anglican students were more circumspect about the implications of Black Consciousness and student radicalism, Catholic students nurtured an increasingly radical theology that crystallised into a distinct stream as the 1970s progressed. This development was primed to a certain extent by their progressive and iconoclastic chaplains, such as Connery, Collins and later Albert Nolan, and ripples of the Second Vatican Council. In addition, the historian Anthony Egan judges the annual conferences of the NCFS, together with the radical direction taken by their newsletter Katutura, to have been ‘instrumental’ in ‘building up the Catholic Left within the NCFS’, which shaped the ideological commitment of Catholic student activism in the remainder of the decade.125 Paradoxically, despite its radical position, the NCFS lost black support when black students split off from the organisation in 1971, mirroring a broader crisis in the relationship between the black Catholic clergy and the predominantly white Catholic hierarchy at the time.126 Thus, although the NCFS was more radical than its Anglican counterpart, it found itself in the embarrassing position of having to keep close contact with the ASF to maintain access to black campuses. At the July 1972 congress in Eston, outside Pietermaritzburg, black students boycotted the meeting and ‘for the first time in 23 years’ there was no black representation, as the ‘four previously-affiliated non- white [sic] societies had resigned shortly beforehand, considering that their main responsibility was to their own communities’.127 The new emphasis on ‘black identity’, as Moore had put it, coincided with a radicalisation of the NCFS, although the links between its radicalisation and the emergence of Black Consciousness are difficult to ascertain. There was, however, immediate interest and support for the movement. Articles in Katutura set out to examine the historical roots of Black Consciousness and Black Theology. These publishing efforts resulted in the NCFS readership being much better informed than the average white lay Catholic, and some NCFS leaders actively supported the Black Consciousness Movement, a stance taken by some clergy as well, as will become apparent in subsequent chapters.128 Egan comments that it was Katutura’s ‘synthesis of New Left sympathies and theology’ that made it the foremost journal after Pro Veritate for promoting a ‘new way of “doing theology” ’.129 The Christian Roots of Black Consciousness 49

Conclusions It should be evident at this point that SASO was established amid a rich network, owing its existence to church structures and Christian student organisations. It is also evident that the importance of these networks was amplified by the sense of intellectual and physical isolation fostered on black students through the broader apartheid policy of separate development. Although SASO may have emerged had these networks not been in place, it would definitely have been in a different form and poorer intellectually without the added dimension of Black Theology. Through a mixture of fortuitousness, occasioned by the breakup of the SCA and the creation of the UCM, and enterprise as represented by Biko’s and Pityana’s move to form an independent black students’ organisation, SASO was born. The shockwaves of this new ‘black consciousness’ were also facilitated by these networks, causing the identity crises that Moore alluded to in his letter. Although this chapter has not been able to draw a conclusive link, it has shown that the emergence of Black Consciousness coincided with a radicalisation of the NCFS, as well as leading to the transformation of the UCM into a Christian adult literacy programme. The relationship between these groups subsequent to SASO’s emergence was contradictory, both critiquing and rejecting, while also drawing from and making use of one another. Black Consciousness presented a thorough critique of the liberal Christian tradition and the assumption, in Biko’s words, that ‘white leadership is a sine qua non in this country’.130 The focus of Biko’s critique revealed the degree of the importance (and complicity) of the liberal missionary heritage, which also helped to create the structures that black students utilised in the face of mounting state repression and the implementation of the policies of Bantu Education.

Notes 1. An earlier version of this chapter was published as ‘Students, Apartheid and the Ecumenical Movement, 1960–1975’, Journal of Southern African Studies 39, no. 2 (2013): 447–63. 2. C. Merrett, A Culture of Censorship: Secrecy and Intellectual Repression in South Africa (Cape Town: David Philip; Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1994), 41. 50 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

. 3 T. Lodge, Sharpeville: A Massacre and its Consequences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 4. A.J. van der Bent, ed., Breaking Down Walls: World Council of Churches Statements and Actions on Racism, 1948–1985 (Geneva: Programme to Combat Racism, World Council of Churches, 1986), 24. 5. L. Evans, ‘South Africa’s and the Dynamics of “Decolonisation”: Reflections on Writing Histories of the Homelands’, South African Historical Journal 64, no. 1 (2012): 122. 6. For studies, see D. Balia, Christian Resistance to Apartheid: Ecumenism in South Africa 1960–1987 (Johannesburg: Skotaville, 1989); E. Strassberger, Ecumenism in South Africa: 1936–1960, with Special Reference to the Mission of the Church (Johannesburg: South African Council of Churches, 1974). 7. J.C. Bennet, The Radical Imperative (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1975). 8. For an authoritative overview, see P. Kallaway, ed., The History of Education under Apartheid, 1948–1994: The Doors of Learning and Culture Shall be Opened (Cape Town: Longman, 2002). 9. J. Hyslop, ‘ “A Destruction Coming in”: Bantu Education as Response to Social Crisis’, in Apartheid’s Genesis: 1935–1962, ed. P. Bonner, P. Delius and D. Posel (Johannesburg: Ravan Press; Wits University Press, 1993), 405. 10. For more on these changes and the response of the apartheid government, see P. Bonner, P. Delius and D. Posel, eds., Apartheid’s Genesis, 1935–1962 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press; Wits University Press, 1993). 11. Hyslop, ‘ “Destruction Coming in” ’, 395. 12. See S. Dubow, Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid, 1919–36 (London: Macmillan, 1989). 13. C. Kros, ‘Economic, Political and Intellectual Origins of Bantu Education 1926–1951’, Ph.D. diss., University of the Witwatersrand, 1996, 29. See also C. Kros, The Seeds of Separate Development: Origins of Bantu Education (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2010). 14. A. Ashforth, The Politics of Official Discourse in Twentieth-Century South Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 1. 15. S. Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility and White South Africa 1820–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 232; Kros, ‘Origins of Bantu Education’, 3. 16. Kros, ‘Origins of Bantu Education’, 30–1. 17. Kros, ‘Origins of Bantu Education’, 2. 18. T.G. Karis and G.M. Gerhart, eds., From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa 1882–1990, Volume 5: Nadir and Resurgence, 1964–1979 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 13. The Christian Roots of Black Consciousness 51

19. A. Dick, The Hidden ’s Book and Reading Cultures (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). 20. T. Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa since 1945 (New York: Longman, 1983), 324–5. 21. C. Charney, ‘Civil Society vs. the State: Identity, Institutions and the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa’, Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2000, 57. 22. South African Democracy Education Trust, The Road to Democracy in South Africa: Volume 1 (1960–1970) (Cape Town: Zebra Press, 2004), in particular, Chapter 2, 53–145. 23. M. Gunther, ‘The National Committee of Liberation (NCL)/African Resistance Movement (ARM)’, in South African Democracy Education Trust, The Road to Democracy in South Africa: Volume 1 (1960–1970) (Cape Town: Zebra Press, 2004), 209–55. 24. For a personal account, see H. Lewin, Bandiet: Out of Jail (Cape Town: Random House, 2002). 25. C. Collins, ‘The Birth of the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa’, WSCF Journal 1, no. 2 (1979): 27. 26. See http://anglicanstudents.net/about-us.aspx. 27. A. Egan, ‘Catholic Intellectuals’, in The Catholic Church in Contemporary Southern Africa, ed. J. Brain and P. Denis (Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 1999), 320. 28. Egan, ‘Catholic Intellectuals’, 321. 29. A. van Schalkwyk, ‘Sister, We Bleed and We Sing: Women’s Stories, Christian Mission and Shalom in South Africa’, D.Th. diss., University of South Africa, 1999, 80. 30. Van Schalkwyk, ‘Sister, We Bleed’, 83. 31. M.R. Maimela, ‘Black Consciousness and White Liberals in South Africa: Paradoxical Anti-apartheid Politics’, Ph.D. diss., University of South Africa, 1999, 17. 32. Egan, ‘Catholic Intellectuals’, 326. 33. R. Vigne, Liberals against Apartheid: A History of the Liberal Party of South Africa, 1953–68 (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 153. 34. F. Wilson ‘Les Mains Sales’, ASF Newsletter, 1963. Church of the Province of South Africa Archives [hereafter CPSA], Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand, AB1626/F, ASF Miscellaneous 1962, 1968–1970. 35. For a discussion, see D. Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968–1977 (Athens: Ohio University Press; Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2010), 69–78. 52 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

36. Wilson, ‘Les Mains Sales’. 37. Katutura (April/May, 1975): 1. CPSA, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand, AB1626/G. 38. M. Horrell, A Survey of Race Relations in South Africa, 1969 (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1970), 257. 39. ‘Katutura Editor’s Report’, Minutes of NCFS Executive Meeting, St Aidan’s, Grahamstown, 31 August–1 September 1974: 3. CPSA, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand, AB1626/G. 40. D. Barry, ‘No Abiding Place of Rest’, Katutura (April/May 1975): 1. CPSA, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand, AB1626/G. 41. P. Walshe, Church versus State in South Africa: The Case of the Christian Institute (London: C. Hurst and Co., 1983), 29. 42. ‘Our Aim’, Pro Veritate 1, no. 1 (May 1962): 8. https://www.aluka.org/ struggles/collection/PSARR. 43. X. Mangcu, Biko: A Biography (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2012), Chapter 2. 44. B. Pityana, ‘D.C.S. Oosthuizen Academic Freedom Memorial Lecture’, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, 18 September 2008, 2. http://www. dcsoosthuizen.blogspot.co.za/p/memorial-lectures.html. 45. For histories, see J.B. Peires, The House of Phalo: A History of the Xhosa People in the Days of Their Independence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); C. Crais, White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-industrial South Africa: The Making of the Colonial Order in the Eastern Cape, 1770–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); C. Crais, The Politics of Evil: Magic, Power and the Political Imagination in South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); A. Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth- Century South Africa and Britain (London: Routledge, 2001). 46. See R. Edgar and H. Sapire, African Apocalypse: The Story of Nontetha Nkwenkwe, a Twentieth-Century South African Prophet, Monographs in International Studies, No. 72 (Athens: Ohio University, Center for International Studies; Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2000). 47. D. Thomas, Christ Divided: Liberalism, Ecumenism, and Race in South Africa (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2002), 93. 48. For a history of the founding of Lovedale and Fort Hare, see D. Burchell ‘African Higher Education and the Establishment of the South African Native College, Fort Hare’, South African Historical Journal 8 (November 1976), 60–83. 49. Thomas, Christ Divided, xiv–xv. 50. B. Pityana, ‘Reflections on 30 Years since the Death of Steve Biko: A Legacy Revisited’, National Arts Festival Winter School lecture, 3 July 2007. http://uir.unisa.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10500/110/Steve%20Biko The Christian Roots of Black Consciousness 53

%20Lecture%202007%20doc%20final%20_2_.pdf;jsessionid= 0B992 F0570A5EAA29225DDA0CE7F54B9?sequence=1. 51. L. Wilson, ‘Bantu Stephen Biko: A Life’, in Bounds of Possibility: The Legacy of Steve Biko and Black Consciousness, ed. B. Pityana, M. Ramphele, M. Mpumlwana and L. Wilson (Cape Town: David Philip, 1991), 19. 52. Steve Biko, interview with Gail Gerhart, cited in Wilson, ‘Biko: A Life’, 19. 53. B. Petersen, Monarchs, Missionaries and African Intellectuals: African Theatre and the Unmaking of Colonial Marginality (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2000). 54. A. Stubbs, ‘Martyr of Hope: A Personal Memoir by Aelred Stubbs, CR’, in S. Biko, I Write What I Like: A Selection of His Writings (London: Penguin, 1978), 239. 55. Wilson, ‘Bantu Stephen Biko’, 20. 56. S. Biko, I Write What I Like (Johannesburg: Picador Africa, 2004), 32. 57. Stubbs, ‘Martyr of Hope’, 178. 58. D. Magaziner, ‘From Students to Prophets: Writing a Political Faith in South Africa, 1968–1977’, Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 2007. 59. Pityana, ‘Reflections on 30 Years’. 60. Bobby Marie, interview, Johannesburg, 15 February 2013. 61. CPSA, AB1626/C1 ASF Correspondence, Letter from G. Muller to B. Pityana, 1970/71? Re minutes/finances. 62. J. Allen, ‘South Africa: Aelred Stubbs, Spiritual Mentor and Editor, Dies’, All Africa Global Media. http://allafrica.com/stories/200411180542.html? viewall=1. 63. Stubbs, ‘Martyr of Hope’, 175. 64. Letter from Aelred Stubbs to friends, September 1977, 2, Killie Campbell Africana Library [hereafter KCM], University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, Alphaeus Zulu Papers, 98/3/59, Statements/Papers/Press Releases. 65. A. Wilkinson, The Community of the Resurrection: A Centenary History (London: SCM Press, 1992), 317. 66. D. van Zyl, ‘The S.C.A.: A Glance around’, Pro Veritate 3, no. 10 (February 1965): 1. https://www.aluka.org/struggles/collection/PSARR. 67. H. Thörn, Anti-apartheid and the Emergence of a Global Civil Society (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009 [2006]); R. Skinner, The Foundations of Anti- apartheid: Liberal Humanitarians and Transnational Activists in Britain and the United States, c.1919–64 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 68. W.J. Houston, ‘A Critical Evaluation of the University Christian Movement as an Ecumenical Mission to Students, 1967–1972’, Master’s thesis, University of South Africa, 1997, 7. 69. Van Zyl, ‘The S.C.A.’, 9. 54 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

70. Collins, ‘Birth of the Black Consciousness Movement’, 28. 71. C. Cook, ‘From Breakwater to Open Sea’, Pro Veritate 6, no. 5 (September 1967): 10. https://www.aluka.org/struggles/collection/PSARR. 72. Collins, ‘Birth of the Black Consciousness Movement’, 28 73. Cook, ‘From Breakwater’, 9. 74. Walshe, Church versus State, 81. 75. See http://colincollins.com.au/about/. 76. P. Maylam, ‘Citation for Basil Moore’, Honorary Graduand, Rhodes University, 8 April 2011. http://www.ru.ac.za/media/rhodesuniversity/ content/ruhome/documents/CITATION%20FOR%20BASIL%20 MOORE.pdf. 77. Dunbar Moodie, interview, Johannesburg, 15 February 2013. 78. Houston, ‘Critical Evaluation’, 44. 79. M. Horrell, A Survey of Race Relations in South Africa: 1967 (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1968), 280. 80. D. Magaziner, ‘Christ in Context: Developing a Political Faith in Apartheid South Africa’, Radical History Review 99 (Fall 2007): 80–106. See also Magaziner, Law and the Prophets. 81. B. Moore, e-mail correspondence, 5 April 2013. 82. See http://www.pbs.org/thisfarbyfaith/people/james_cone.html. 83. Moore, e-mail correspondence, 5 April 2013. 84. Karis and Gerhart, Nadir and Resurgence, 74. 85. Basil Moore, ‘Towards a Black Theology’, typewritten document, n.d. [1970], Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand, AD 1126 D6(9). See Magaziner, ‘Christ in Context’, 96. 86. Moore, ‘Towards a Black Theology’, 1. 87. Moore, ‘Towards a Black Theology’, 23. 88. Merrett, Culture of Censorship, 3. 89. Karis and Gerhart, Nadir and Resurgence, 74. 90. Pityana, ‘D.C.S. Oosthuizen Academic Freedom Memorial Lecture’, 3. 91. G.M. Gerhart, ‘Interview with Steve Biko’, in Biko Lives! Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko, ed. A. Mngxitama, A. Alexander and N.C. Gibson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 26. 92. Collins, ‘Birth of the Black Consciousness Movement’, 26. 93. L. Wilson, Steve Biko: A Jacana Pocket Biography (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2011), 34–6. 94. ‘Communique as Drawn up by the 1969 SASO Conference’. http://www. aluka.org/stable/10.5555/al.sff.document.mem19690700.032.008.743. 95. ‘Communique’. 96. ‘Communique’. The Christian Roots of Black Consciousness 55

97. SASO Newsletter (August 1970): 22. http://www.aluka.org/struggles/ collection/PSAPRC. 98. SASO Newsletter (September 1970): 4. http://www.aluka.org/struggles/ collection/PSAPRC. 99. G. Maré, informal conversation, 28 June 2011. 100. Dick, Hidden History. 101. M. Mangena, On Your Own: Evolution of Black Consciousness in South Africa/ Azania (Johannesburg: Skotaville, 1989), 11. 102. ‘Resolution 76/70’, in ‘South African Students’ Organisation: Resolutions adopted at the 1st SASO General Students’ Council, July 4th–July 10th 1970’, 20. http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/res19700704032008744. 103. Mangcu, Biko, 115–16. 104. ‘Resolution 1/70 and Motion’, in ‘South African Students’ Organisation: Resolutions adopted at the 1st SASO General Students’ Council, July 4th– July 10th 1970’, 20. http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/res19700704032008744. 105. ‘Conference News’, SASO Newsletter (August 1970): 3. http://psimg. jstor.org/fsi/img/pdf/t0/10.5555/al.sff.document.1681.5777.000.000. aug1970_normal.pdf. 106. ‘Resolution 15/70’ and ‘Resolution 68/70’, in ‘South African Students’ Organisation: Resolutions adopted at the 1st SASO General Students’ Council, July 4th–July 10th 1970’, 3–4, 19. http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/ res19700704032008744. 107. ‘Editorial’, SASO Newsletter (September 1970): 1–2. http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/ sasep70. 108. ‘Frank-talk’ [S. Biko], ‘Black Souls in White Skins?’, SASO Newsletter (August 1970): 15. http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/saaug70. See also Biko, I Write. 109. ‘Black Souls in White Skins?’, 17. 110. ‘Frank-talk’ [S. Biko], ‘We Blacks’, SASO Newsletter (September 1970): 15. http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/sasep70. 111. ‘We Blacks’, 18. 112. ‘Regional Formation Schools’, SASO Newsletter (September 1970): 6. http:// disa.ukzn.ac.za/sasep70. 113. Introductory notes, ‘Report on the 1st National Formation School held on the 1st to the 4th December, 1969, at the Black Section, University of Natal’. http://www.aluka.org/stable/10.5555/al.sff.document.rep19691201.032. 008.743?searchUri=. 114. SASO Newsletter (August 1970): 5. http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/saaug70. 115. SASO Newsletter (August 1970): 6. http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/saaug70. 116. Sunday Times, 9 August 1970. 56 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

117. Letter from Basil Moore to Pharis Harvey, 22 June 1971, 1–2. http://www.aluka. org/stable/10.5555/al.sff.document.let19710622.026.009.929?searchUri= so%3Dps_collection_name_str%2Basc%26Query%3Dbasil%2Bmoore. 118. Letter from Basil Moore to Pharis Harvey, 2. 119. A. Stubbs, ‘The Story of Nyameko Barney Pityana’, South African Outlook (October 1979), cited in Maimela, ‘Black Consciousness and White Liberals’, 174. 120. Letter from G. Muller to B. Pityana. 121. Letter to ‘Mike’ from Stephen Hayes, 16 August 1973, CPSA, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand, AB1626/ C1 ASF Correspondence. 122. Letter from Bill Johnston to Jeremy Gauntlett, 26 August 1971, CPSA, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand, AB1626/C1. 123. Although not given a first name in the document, it is highly likely that the author was Sigqibo Dwane, grandson of the pioneering James Dwane (1848–1916), who established the Order of Ethiopia. Sigqibo Dwane would become a noted theologian and the first Bishop of the Order of Ethiopia. He was tragically killed in a car accident on 8 July 2006. 124. Fr Dwane, ‘The Church and Youth’, CPSA, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand, AB1626/E, ASF Talks 1969–1974, 2. 125. A. Egan, The Politics of a South African Catholic Student Movement, 1960–1987, Communications Series No. 20 (Cape Town: Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, 1991), 65. 126. P. Denis, The Dominican Friars in Southern Africa: A Social History, 1557–1990 (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 262. 127. M. Horrell, D. Horner, and J. Kane-Berman, A Survey of Race Relations in South Africa, 1971 (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1972), 43. 128. Egan, Politics, 69. 129. Egan, Politics, 71. 130. Biko, I Write, 26. Black Consciousness and Student Protest 57

Chapter 2

Black Consciousness and Student Protest in the Late 1960s

To ask the right questions, to encourage a new consciousness, and to suggest new forms which express it, are the basic purposes of our new direction . . . Many people would prefer to be colour-blind; to them skin pigmentation is merely an incident of creation. To us it is something much more fundamental: it is a synonym for subjection, an identification for the disinherited, the discarded people and the wretched of the earth. ––– Barney Pityana, ‘Power and Social Change in South Africa’

part from the Christian student organisations, the National AUnion of South African Students (NUSAS) was the national student body, and both provided part of the context out of which the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) emerged. The 1969 SASO communiqué made special mention of NUSAS and its policy of principled opposition to apartheid. Although the writers of the communiqué recognised that ‘now . . . students appear to be a power to be reckoned with in this country’ and acknowledged NUSAS as the national student union, they critiqued NUSAS’s approach as resulting in ‘a further curb on freedom and a victimization of the few student leaders’ involved. This was part of a strategy practised by NUSAS that the writers characterised as ‘protest after the fact’. They argued that this practice needed to be replaced by ‘a more positive’ approach ‘that will reduce individual hazards and improve the lot of the students’ at the segregated university colleges.1 The appeal to ‘black consciousness’ was therefore a description of a revision and rethinking of strategy.

57 58 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

This chapter examines how students could come to be described in 1969 as ‘a power to be reckoned with’ by looking closely at protests at black and white tertiary institutions.2 Barney Pityana’s reflections to a student conference in 1971, quoted in the epigraph to this chapter, were a key moment of the crystallisation of his ideas and as a public statement of the critique offered by SASO of the political status quo. Their emotional force is indicative of the fight of Black Consciousness leaders to carve a discursive space as part of the process of liberating themselves from the dominance of white voices. This chapter looks at the student protests of 1968 to 1972 and the reorganisation of NUSAS. Julian Brown has convincingly demonstrated the degree to which forms of public protest evolved from the 1960s through to the Soweto Uprising and has highlighted the interrelationship between white and black students’ struggles.3 While recognising these aspects of this period, this chapter emphasises the potential common generational cause as ‘youth’, a possible basis of solidarity that remained hemmed in by the racially bifurcated nature of the apartheid system. While apartheid conferred a position of power on white students, it simultaneously disenfranchised black students on a number of levels from physical harassment to a silencing of black students on supposedly multiracial platforms. In this sense, as interlocutors, Black Consciousness leaders in SASO challenged NUSAS to re-examine itself and to redirect its attention away from representing black students to rather critiquing white society. The challenge of Black Consciousness coincided with a power struggle within NUSAS, in which radicals sought to break the power of a privileged and more conservative NUSAS leadership that had historically dominated the organisation. It was this interplay, between the Black Consciousness leaders, on the one hand, and a cohering New Left, on the other, which was to change NUSAS powerfully.

The apartheid state and the youth ‘counter-culture’ While conditions at the segregated black universities were restrictive and intellectually stultifying, censorship and the control of ideas were more subtle in relation to the white student population. As Archie Dick writes: Black Consciousness and Student Protest 59

Turning its attention to young white readers in the 1950s and 1960s, the apartheid state became more determined ‘to protect’ their minds from books with dangerous ideas. Assuming a custodial role took the shape of ‘information resistance’ and ‘youth preparedness’ schemes to safeguard South Africa’s white youth from communist ideas and influences.4

In opposition to this straitjacketed control, in the late 1960s a ‘counter- culture’ developed in South Africa as ‘a space within which discourses could be explored’.5 While a small number of students could source books, music became a more accessible avenue for students, offering an inchoate blend of anti-establishment feeling that resonated with the rebellion of youth.6 A ‘set of symbolic forms’ associated with the global youth culture were influences the apartheid government was increasingly uncomfortable with.7 As Helen Lunn emphasises in her doctoral study, the counter- culture utilised technological innovation, such as portable radios and the advent of air travel, to transmit the music and icons of the ‘global youth culture’ and enabled a direct encounter with other societies that facilitated taking a critical perspective on South African society.8 This was perhaps most powerfully illustrated by the visit of the American senator Robert Kennedy to South Africa in 1966 on the invitation of NUSAS president Ian Robertson, a moment that gave inspiration to many and informed a vague idealism that was nonetheless a spur for many to renewed hope for a progressive political future for the country, while simultaneously proving an embarrassment for the apartheid government. As the government looked vigilantly for potential sources of insurrection, liberal students were increasingly seen as ‘a cancer in the life of South Africa that must be cut out’, as the Minister of Justice J.B. Vorster expressed it in 1963.9 The assassination of Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd on 6 September 1966 by parliamentary messenger Dimitri Tsafendas added a sense of self-justified trauma to the state’s increasing securitisation and abuse of human rights. In 1968 the apartheid state outlawed multiracial political parties under the Prohibition of Improper Interference Act. Alan Paton’s Liberal Party chose to disband in protest, rather than to continue as an exclusively white party.10 The end of the Liberal Party signalled a 60 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS low point for South African liberals and enhanced a feeling of political impasse, which had been building steadily during the 1960s. The situation was compounded by the state’s efforts to tarnish the image of the leading liberal research institute, the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) and to represent it as out of touch with political currents within the country.11 The apogee of international student radicalism, with the 1968 global revolts, coincided with the nadir of South African liberalism and provided NUSAS and the radicals in its ranks with an opportunity to take the initiative to engage in new forms of political activism.12 It was thus only with the decade’s close that ideas that had stimulated international activism began to gain real purchase in South Africa.13 While the English-speaking universities were heirs to the British liberal tradition and asserted the core twin rights of academic freedom and university autonomy as fundamental to the integrity of a university, the Afrikaans-speaking institutions were cast in a different mould and viewed the university’s function as being in service to the nation’s interests in accordance with the ideology of Christian nationalism. The alignment of Afrikaans universities with state interests signalled the politicisation, institutionalisation and nationalisation of knowledge and fostered the ‘development of separate or parallel intellectual fields’ between Afrikaans- and English-speaking campuses that meant that by the 1970s, ‘the social sciences were thoroughly bifurcated’.14

NUSAS and Rick Turner A very brief history of NUSAS is useful for understanding the full extent of the changes that would take place in the organisation in the late 1960s.15 From its formation in the 1930s, the organisation attempted to emphasise the importance of ‘contact’ between students, placated Afrikaner concerns and sought to accommodate African demands for increased representation. It was only after the 1948 electoral victory of the National Party that the

lingering hope of eventual reunification between English and Afrikaner students receded, and the central focus of debate in NUSAS shifted to tension on the English-language campuses between the urge to involve NUSAS in the wider issues of Black Consciousness and Student Protest 61

national politics and the view that the organization should confine itself solely to student matters.16

The historian Martin Legassick makes a distinction between a ‘students as such’ approach versus a ‘students in society’ approach, a dichotomy that NUSAS negotiated through its history. Opinions oscillated between an emphasis on student concerns and a focus on political leadership acting as a vanguard for democratic values and progressive change in society.17 In the absence of legal avenues for black political expression, NUSAS attempted to woo black students to its cause. Although later disgraced, Adrian Leftwich made a lasting impression on Turfloop students, as Themba Sono recalled, when he visited the campus during his presidency of the organisation. Leftwich overtly ignored the petty apartheid laws, which stipulated that he use segregated sleeping and eating facilities, while speaking out openly in favour of a full black franchise.18 NUSAS had courted controversy in the 1960s, which had made the government’s attempts to smear the organisation easier.19 It had to endure hostility from the white population, exemplified in one incident in late 1969 when a man with ‘an English accent’ telephoned the NUSAS office asking if the vacancy for a cook had been filled. The general secretary, Sheila Lapinsky, answered in the affirmative, to which the caller replied that ‘NUSAS should get Mr Grisbeek the poisoner as he would “do you chaps a lot of good” ’ and then ended the call.20 NUSAS played into the government’s hands when in 1964 NUSAS president Jonty Driver gave an address at Botha’s Hill, Natal, to what was supposed to be a closed meeting, in which, it was alleged, Driver suggested NUSAS become a front for the national liberation movement. Driver’s Botha’s Hill speech was in fact a carefully worded response to Legassick’s recommendations that NUSAS switch to individual affiliation. Legassick’s restructuring would allow for NUSAS to become a more effective intellectual vanguard, with the possibility of having a black majority. Driver rejected the proposal and argued it would bring about the certain collapse of NUSAS. The Botha’s Hill participants rejected the radical position. Driver, however, was subsequently censured for the ‘recklessness’ of his speech, amply showing the fine line NUSAS was forced to steer between substantive 62 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS protest and the danger of government proscription. This group of NUSAS leaders provided a circle of friends for the young Rick Turner, at that stage a philosophy student at the University of Cape Town, where he shared a room with Driver.21 Born on 25 September 1941 in Cape Town, Turner grew up on a farm close to Stellenbosch, called Welcarmas, which became, as biographer Billy Keniston notes, ‘a central feature of Richard’s life’.22 Turner registered to study engineering at the University of Cape Town in 1959, but switched to philosophy after a year. Among Turner’s early intellectual influences was Martin Versfeld, an Afrikaans Catholic philosopher who lectured at the University of Cape Town and was also an influence on Afrikaans poet Breyten Breytenbach, Turner’s senior by a few years. Turner was increasingly drawn to continental philosophy, which he had been ‘unconvincingly taught’ and as a result he ‘was determined to go to the source, to meet Sartre himself ’.23 After he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) degree in philosophy in 1963, Turner boarded a ship with his young wife Barbara Hubbard for the journey to France. He wrote his doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne in Paris, a study of important points of political theory in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, which he completed in 1966, written in French with the help of Barbara. The English title of his thesis was ‘Some Implications of Existentialist Phenomenology’.24 This was a formative stage of his life, as Tony Morphet would later observe: ‘At a step Turner placed himself outside the familiar constructs of South African reality and instead located his thought within radical European traditions.’25 Turner’s decision to return to South Africa after the completion of his studies marked for Morphet the point from which Turner’s ‘life project’ gained ‘consistently in unity, coherence and depth’. After his return from his studies at the Sorbonne in August 1966, Turner brought a new standard of philosophical and political incisiveness to bear on student politics in South Africa. Although he had returned, now with a young family, to manage the farm, he soon gave up both the farm and the second doctorate he had begun at the end of 1968 and took a temporary position at the University of Stellenbosch in the first academic term of 1969. Barbara remembers the importance of this period as an ‘exciting time’ for Turner, who came into contact with André Brink and Frederik van Zyl Slabbert. Turner did ‘a lot Black Consciousness and Student Protest 63 of talking with people on the Afrikaner left, the verligtes’.26 These discussions shaped Turner and it was later a distinguishing feature of his politics that he was never disparaging of the potential radicalism of the Afrikaner left.27 In the second half of 1969 Turner had a temporary position at the politics department at Rhodes University. He took an active role in student politics, described as ‘a disturber of the peace’ by an unnamed Rhodes colleague.28 Hailing from Stellenbosch, Turner had access to another progressive space, made possible under the auspices of the church, St Nicholas’ Priory adjoining Stellenbosch University. St Nicholas’ Priory was founded by the Dominican Order of the Catholic Church. Under the leadership and inspiration of Augustine Shutte and Oswin Magrath, a Dominican priest based in Stellenbosch from 1937 to 1956, Stellenbosch was to become a surprising source of progressive politics.29 Part of the significance of St Nicholas’ Priory was as a centre of intellectual activity. The Dominican ‘house of studies’ was established in Stellenbosch in 1943. The need for the new priory was caused by the application of three young men to the Order, whom the Dominicans were loath to lose, as well as by the Second World War that had created a ‘shortage of vocations’. The house was bilingual (English and Afrikaans). Oswin Magrath and Bonaventure Perquin served as lecturers and a philosophy course was introduced, as ‘an act of faith in the future’. The next two decades saw the consolidation of St Nicholas’ and ‘local academics and clergy from all denominations would often drop in to see the friars’. In the 1960s the priory was closely involved in the gespreksgroepe (discussion groups) organised by the Stellenbosch philosopher Professor Johan Degenaar and the friars Ninian McManus, Timothy McDermott and Albert Nolan were invited to represent the discipline of theology, along with some local Protestant clergy at the group. The political awareness of the friars was stimulated by their involvement in the National Catholic Federation of Students (NCFS), the University Christian Movement (UCM), as well as another group, Intersem. The priory’s new vicar general, Hans Brenninkmeijer, embraced the aggiornamento initiated by the Second Vatican Council and his appointment led to liturgical ‘experiments’ similar to what the UCM had pioneered at Rhodes University.30 64 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

Turner invited other radicals to visit St Nicholas’ to meet the Dominican friars. As a student leader of the Radical Students Society, Raphael Kaplinsky was a Marxist who ‘held no truck with the church’. Although Turner shared his atheism, it was to Kaplinsky’s great surprise that Turner approached him in Cape Town to visit St Nicholas’. Kaplinsky recalls being amazed at the progressive nature of the friars at Stellenbosch, ‘both personally and politically’. In Kaplinsky’s estimation, it was the Dominicans, especially under the intellectual leadership of Augustine Shutte, a lecturer in political philosophy at the University of Cape Town, who were the driving force for the progressive radicalism at Stellenbosch and they formed ‘a cadre of intellectual dynamism’ that benefited from the relative protection offered by the Catholic Church.31 It was in this role, as a ‘philosophical catalyst’ protected in part by the Church, that the group gave new intellectual energy and direction to the development of progressive radicalism among a small group of students in the Western Cape.32 This description of the early career of Turner and the progressive space that had been created in Stellenbosch sets the scene for our understanding of what was to be the next critical development and a warning sign to the apartheid state that students on both liberal English campuses and the so-called bush universities were prepared to take principled stands against their university administrations, thus becoming, increasingly ‘a force to be reckoned with’.

‘What is the use of a degree if one is only to become the puppet of one’s degree?’ The Mafeje affair and the 1968 sit-ins The apartheid government unknowingly set a ball in motion when it intervened into university affairs at the University of Cape Town in 1968 to prevent the university from employing a black academic, Archie Mafeje. The University Council had initially considered three applicants and on 1 May 1968 had offered the post of senior lecturer in the social anthropology department to Mafeje, who was completing his doctorate at Cambridge. Mafeje had the strong backing of his mentor, the distinguished anthropologist Professor Monica Wilson, who argued that he was the ‘ablest’ of the three candidates and was ‘much the best teacher’.33 The university registrar wrote Mafeje a letter to inform him of his successful application, but the letter was not sent. Black Consciousness and Student Protest 65

The principal, Richard Luyt, had received a letter from the Minister of Education Jan de Klerk,34 which threatened that the government ‘would not hesitate to take such steps as it may deem fit to ensure that the accepted traditional outlook of South Africa was observed’ if the university were to employ Mafeje.35 Although the University Council released a statement to protest the government’s encroachment of university affairs and Dean of Arts Professor M.W.M. Pope resigned in protest, the Council gave in and rescinded Majefe’s appointment.36 NUSAS delegates protested the Council’s decision at its mid- year congress at the University of the Witwatersrand in June 1968. The NUSAS delegates passed resolutions that condemned the Council’s ‘betrayal of the university’s principles of academic freedom and autonomy’ and urged the university’s Student Representative Council (SRC) to ‘do the utmost in its power to organise effective and significant protest’. NUSAS called on students at universities and training colleges to support the protests fully.37 When students returned to the University of Cape Town from the July vacation, the SRC and university administration called for a mass meeting to be held at Jameson Hall to discuss the matter. At the meeting Kaplinsky made an ‘impromptu speech’ that condemned the meeting as ‘a salve to conscience and a ritual’ and judged the Council guilty of ‘doing the government’s dirty work for them’.38 The students demanded that more radical steps be taken to counter the encroachment on academic freedom. Kaplinsky called for another mass meeting a week later, which would lead to a peaceful occupation (sit-in) of the university’s administration building if the Council failed to reinstate Mafeje. On 14 August students assembled on the steps of Jameson Hall and went on to occupy the administration block. The sit-in was a transformative event for the participants. This was particularly true for Turner, for whom the event was ‘pivotal’ as it was at the sit-in that he transformed from a little-known philosopher ‘to be defined as a student leader’.39 Jeremy Cronin, a law student at the university, who later became a member of the South African Communist Party, described being ‘seduced intellectually’ at the alternative university lectures of the sit-in and remarks that the ‘key seducer’ was Turner.40 The occupation lasted nine days, during which a core group of between 150 and 200 students slept and ate in the administration block, although close to 1 000 students 66 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS participated in the protest from time to time.41 Members of staff gave seminars and lectures. Ken Hughes, one of the student participants in the sit-in, presents the origin of the sit-in as an outgrowth of the democratic culture at the university. The encroachment of apartheid on academic freedom, he argues, was the chief mobilising factor.42 On 16 August Prime Minister B.J. Vorster warned that he would intervene if the universities failed to end the sit-ins.43 The sit-in was widely reported in the press and ended when a group of ‘450 conservative students’ from the universities of Cape Town and Stellenbosch arrived, threatening to physically evict the protesting students themselves.44 Students from the University of the Witwatersrand, who protested the revoking of Mafeje’s appointment along Jan Smuts Avenue in Johannesburg, were also attacked, pelted with ‘eggs, fruit, paint and whitewash’ by Rand Afrikaanse Universiteit and Goudstad students, as well as having their names taken by the security police.45 Although ended by one segment of the public, in the form of the conservative students, there was public support for the sit- in. One woman writing under the nom de plume of ‘Justitia’ in the Cape Times remarked that the students in the sit-in ‘should be given a public vote of thanks’ for improving South Africa’s international image, ‘showing the outside world that all South Africans are not race-ridden barbarians’ and therefore they should be shown ‘suitable gratitude, instead of heaping opprobrium on them, as many do’.46 Participants at a SASO formation school in December 1969, however, questioned the efficacy of the sit-in, calling it a ‘reactionary type of protest’ that eroded the overall efficacy of protest, confusing a specific injustice, in the rescinding of Mafeje’s contract, with the need to draw attention to and protest the overall system. 47 In contrast to the widely reported sit-in at the University of Cape Town, another highly dramatic sit-in at Fort Hare escaped close attention, but mobilised a far wider range of students. Students at Fort Hare had conducted a sit-in to protest the university’s appointment on 16 August 1968 of a new rector, Professor J.M. de Wet, an obvious Bantu Education supporter. In contrast to the Cape Town sit-in, for which information is readily available, the Fort Hare sit-in is much more obscure, with relatively scant sources, which are mediated through white observers, a reflection of the black students’ ‘fear of victimisation’, which led them not to make statements to the press.48 Black Consciousness and Student Protest 67

The 1960s had been tumultuous for the institution, with regular protests, harassment of students by the university authorities and police, and open connivance with the police Special Branch. In this climate of repression, from September 1960 Fort Hare students had, year after year, opted not to elect an SRC because of the reality that its members would be vulnerable to persecution and even expulsion. The establishment of the Federal Theological Seminary of Southern Africa (FEDSEM) at Alice in 1962, an unexpected boon to ecumenism occasioned by apartheid repression as Philippe Denis and Graham Duncan show,49 provided some relief and ‘retained the liberal and progressive traditions of pre-apartheid Fort Hare’ that offered students ‘a window into the world’ and an opportunity to make contact with international guests.50 On the appointment of De Wet, the student body boycotted his installation ceremony and some students secretly painted slogans ‘of a political nature’ on the library and college hall,51 such as ‘Fort Hare for Africans not Afrikaners’, ‘Fort Hare not rubbish bin for Potchefstroom scum’ and ‘De Wet obey De Wet van die land [the law of the land] and go to RAU [Rand Afrikaans University]’.52 On 18 August the rector summoned seventeen students and accused them of being responsible for the slogans. Although they protested innocence, they were charged by the Special Branch and had their rooms searched. De Wet refused subsequent requests by the student body to meet to discuss the matter. On 27 August the rector gave permission in the late afternoon for students to hold a meeting. At the meeting, students passed a resolution that outlined their grievances, particularly the victimisation of the seventeen students and requested the rector to address them. The group decided to meet the following day in front of the administration block and to remain sitting there until the rector conceded and addressed them.53 The following day, on 28 August, the students did not attend lectures and instead quietly gathered in front of the administration building, but De Wet had left early that morning for Pretoria on university business. In the middle of the day the college authorities posted a notice that carried De Wet’s authority informing the students that the college would be closed if they had not dispersed by Friday 30 August. The following day the college posted another notice to the 68 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS effect that the UCM had been banned from campus, an ‘arbitrary and authoritarian action [that] intensified the resentment of the students’.54 The college closed on 29 August for a short vacation, during which time De Wet returned. The evening before the start of the new term, on 4 September, the university chaplains intervened to ask some staff members to approach the rector to meet with a delegation of students. This appears not to have worked, as on 5 September with the start of the new term, students resumed their sit-in. De Wet responded by sending two messages to the students, first warning of ‘further action’ if they did not return to lectures and then notifying them that they had until 4 o’clock that afternoon to disperse. The students ignored this ultimatum and by Friday 6 September, they were still seated in front of the administration building. De Wet then issued his final ultimatum, notifying the students who ‘were desirous of continuing their work’ and who would ‘submit to the discipline of the College’ to sign lists at their respective hostels by noon that day.55 The students responded by attempting to send another delegation to meet with the rector, but were twice refused. After the noon deadline had passed, a notice to the students informed them that they had been suspended and were now considered trespassers. They were given until 3 o’clock that afternoon to vacate the premises, failing which ‘steps’ would be ‘taken against them’. The group of 290 students bravely remained seated. At 3 o’clock 30 policemen arrived in vans, armed with tear gas and accompanied by six dogs. The police commandant told the students that they were to be arrested for trespassing and they could either be placed in the local police station or return to their homes under police custody. In this tense and potentially explosive situation, the students responded calmly, singing ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ and the American Civil Rights anthem, ‘We Shall Overcome’, before they complied and gave their names and addresses to the police. All the students were then taken to their hostels to collect their belongings before being escorted to the Cookhouse train station, without the benefit of food or money for their journeys. Police at the station prevented anyone from contacting the students and threatened those who attempted to with arrest.56 Among this group was Barney Pityana, who later recalled in a 2008 speech in commemoration of the Afrikaans philosopher Daantjie Oosthuizen, that it lasted for five days and was organised to protest Black Consciousness and Student Protest 69

‘the Afrikanerisation and Bantustanisation of the university’, together with ‘the barring of Archie Mafeje from a teaching position at UCT’.57 Importantly, in Pityana’s speech, he linked the Fort Hare sit-in, with the international 1968 protests, the common cause he judged to be the ‘rendering [of] universities an innocuous convenience for the power elites’.58 Information about the Fort Hare sit-in was relayed in a fact sheet prepared for all NUSAS branches and duly dubbed ‘the Fort Hare affair’. The plight of the Fort Hare students touched a nerve of their white counterparts at Natal, Wits and Cape Town universities, particularly their ‘courage’ in standing up ‘for what they believed to be right’.59 On hearing the news of the suspension of the Fort Hare students, NUSAS president, Duncan Innes, interrupted his executive tour and immediately left Durban to fly down to Port Elizabeth, arriving in Grahamstown late the following night where he gathered information from Rhodes students, as well as UCM and FEDSEM members, who had been closely following events, but he was unable to meet with the Fort Hare students as the suspended students had already left and the remaining students were subject to strict control. After gathering all the information he could, Innes returned to Durban where he met with the standing committee of SRC presidents in Durban. The standing committee issued a statement that called on De Wet to withdraw the suspensions of the students and asked other university principals and councils to also put pressure on Fort Hare to revoke the suspensions. Lastly, students throughout South Africa were requested to protest ‘with vigour and determination’ in the subsequent week, in the best way they saw fit. 60 The standing committee also planned that student leaders would congregate in Grahamstown at the end of the week to request an interview with De Wet. The following day, Monday 9 September, Innes addressed a meeting of around 800 students at the Pietermaritzburg campus of the University of Natal, where he described the recourse of students to a sit-in as ‘indicative of the whole system of Fort Hare . . . where the authority of the Rector is used to suppress the opinions of students’ and the university taught ‘students to bow to authority’. After his address, students duly signed a petition that received 1 000 signatures. 70 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

That evening at Rhodes, a 700-strong student meeting passed a resolution that asked the principals of all South African universities to ‘protest most strongly against the summary mass suspension of the Fort Hare students and the resultant infringement of academic freedom’.61 The following day, at the University of the Witwatersrand, a mass meeting of around 1 200 students opted to set up a picket line along Jan Smuts Avenue that afternoon, which was subsequently broken up by the police. Taking exception to their treatment by the police, the students again held a picket protest the following day, ‘to protest against police interference on their campus’. On the same day, students at the Johannesburg College of Education opted to picket, but were asked by their rector, Dr Holmes, to do so off campus. The subsequent picket of approximately 30 students was then accosted by a police force larger than their number, which broke up the protest, confiscated posters and took the names of students involved. On Thursday 11 September students in Pietermaritzburg staged a teach-in at the university and 1 000 students marched across the campus and set up a picket line on its edge. At the University of Cape Town 1 200 students held a mass meeting and elected to set up a picket on De Waal Drive, causing a traffic jam. In Durban that evening, nearly 100 students held a torchlight vigil at the university. On Friday 12 September a picket on the steps of St George’s Cathedral in Cape Town was broken up by naval cadets. As planned, on the Friday evening, Innes, Mark Orkin, the SRC president from the University of the Witwatersrand, and Phil van der Merwe, the University of Cape Town SRC president, arrived at Rhodes University to decide whether to go ahead with the planned convoy to travel to Fort Hare to request a meeting with De Wet. At the meeting they learnt that De Wet had refused to see any student delegation and that the police had set up roadblocks around Grahamstown, as well as maintaining a visible presence in Alice, the town Fort Hare was situated in. Furthermore, Minister of Bantu Administration, Development and Education M.C. Botha declared that what happened at Fort Hare was ‘of no concern to white students’ and that white students on the premises of Fort Hare would be prosecuted. The meeting at Rhodes decided to respond with a symbolic protest, where Innes and the SRC presidents would drive to Fort Hare to lay ‘a wreath at the foot of Black Consciousness and Student Protest 71 the James Stewart Memorial’, signifying the death of the vision of the founder of Fort Hare. On Saturday morning, students held a teach-in at Rhodes, where the speakers included Athol Fugard and an unnamed Fort Hare student, following which, Innes, Andy Murray (NUSAS deputy president), Van der Merwe and Peter Harris (Rhodes SRC president) left for Alice. Upon finding the entrance to the memorial blocked by police, the student leaders found another way in and duly laid the wreath. Innes read out his prepared eulogy to the vision of Stewart that decried the ‘intolerable conditions of oppression’ at Fort Hare, in which ‘the pursuit of truth is hampered and strangled’.62 ‘Today we remember the students of Fort Hare,’ he concluded. ‘We will not forget them.’ On Monday 16 September, De Wet announced that students who had been suspended could reapply to the college, following which Innes called for an end to student protests throughout the country. In the aftermath of the protests, Innes remarked on the success with which tertiary institutions had ‘linked-up’ and that it was ‘the first time in many years that I have seen white students really concerned about the problems facing their non-white fellows [sic]’. As a result, Turfloop students elected to affiliate to NUSAS, as well as the FEDSEM SRC. Innes was encouraged that ‘the events of the last week’ would ‘see South African students entering into a new era of their existence’. Despite attacks from the prime minister, the minister of Bantu administration and Afrikaans newspapers and students, Innes observed that ‘the English-speaking campuses’ had ‘reacted very well’. It was the courage of Fort Hare students, above all, that impressed Innes and he felt it would serve as an example for all students in the country. Seeking to understand the Fort Hare students’ stand, Innes was impressed by one Fort Hare student’s apt reply: ‘What is the use of a degree if one is only to become the puppet of one’s degree?’63 Although Innes called for an end to protests, the ‘Fort Hare affair’ was not yet over. By 22 October, all of the students bar 21 had been readmitted after signing a promise to strictly comply with the rules of the college, but the rector reserved the right of summary expulsion for any failure to comply with the rules. However, shortly after the suspended students returned to the college in late September, students requested that permission be granted for a student meeting and that 72 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS the 21 barred students be readmitted on the basis that their selection had been arbitrary and that they were not the organisers of the sit- in. De Wet refused to grant permission for a student meeting and did not grant the request to readmit the 21. On 12 October, students used the opportunity of the screening of a movie to discuss the issue and decided to send a letter to De Wet explaining their position. On Monday 14 October, seven students bravely took the letter that had been signed by all the student body to De Wet, who finally met with them. The letter requested that the 21 students be readmitted and also that De Wet end the practice of using informers on campus to spread rumours that had led to some students being wrongly detained by the police. Although De Wet was friendly in the meeting, he turned down all of the requests and informed the students that the use of informers was necessary.64 The inflexible response to the students’ requests intensified a feeling of hopelessness among the students. A week later, slogans were painted on the wall of the library during the night, stating ‘We Want 21’, ‘Away with Nazi tactics’, ‘Address or resign’ and ‘Lecturers or Jeugbond?’. At this point, events took a much more sinister turn. De Wet chose to make no move in response to the slogans and bided his time until twelve days later when three police cars arrived on campus and took away Tshepo Lekhela, Victor Bambani and Winston Amos. Another four students were similarly taken away by the police – M. Tena, J. Ntsebenza, Hope Jamba and Simon Mabusela. Each of the students was then brought back to the campus with the police to have their room searched. Attempts by students and Bambani’s parents to enquire as to the whereabouts of the students were met with silence.65 After fourteen days, the seven students were brought before a court on charges of damage to property, to which they all pleaded guilty, were fined and then suspended from Fort Hare for three years.66 By 14 April 1969, Innes noted that the harsh system at Fort Hare continued apace. Of the 400 students admitted at the start of the academic year, 40 had already been expelled. Students were subject to a harsher regime than ever before: they were prevented from leaving campus without official permission; student meetings and the publication of pamphlets or other materials without permission were strictly forbidden; and no ‘outsider’ was permitted on the university Black Consciousness and Student Protest 73 grounds as a visitor nor was any Fort Hare student allowed to visit any other institution without the permission of the rector.67 Although not directly connected with each other, the two sit-ins at Cape Town and Fort Hare give some background to the view taken in 1969 that students were increasingly ‘a power to be reckoned with’. In an era of enforced conformity, the 1968 sit-ins caused reverberations larger than their immediate set of concerns. Although the initial Cape Town sit-in was crucial for students involved, the subsequent Fort Hare sit-in sparked a much wider movement of students across the country. Innes was correct in presaging a ‘new era’ in student relations, but the nature of this new era was very different from what he had anticipated.

Shockwaves and NUSAS’s reorganisation Although Innes was close to Biko and had been elected as NUSAS president on the proposal of Biko at the 1968 NUSAS conference,68 the way in which Innes positioned white liberal students as the vanguard of the country’s values was tellingly misplaced. In a 1969 speech to the Wits student body, Innes responded to the National Party press and conservative students’ pamphlets that linked NUSAS to the liberation movement. NUSAS was not and could not be a subversive organisation, Innes argued. It was a national students’ union mandated to represent students’ opinions and could do no more.69 However, Innes called on students to recognise South Africa as ‘our country, our responsibility’ and to take a strong role in the pursuit of justice. It was this sense of righteous leadership that SASO and Biko jolted so powerfully. SASO did not initially offer an overt challenge to the liberal and white-dominated NUSAS, as it accepted the ‘principle that in any one country at any time a national union must be open to all students in that country’. But Biko eloquently explained SASO’s motive: ‘What SASO objects to is the dichotomy between principle and practice so apparent among members of that organisation [NUSAS]. While very few would like to criticise NUSAS policy and principles as they appear on paper one tends to get worried at all the hypocrisy practised by members of that organisation.’70 White student leaders were initially shocked, however, at the increasingly radical tone of their black counterparts. In March 1969 at a meeting at the Alan Taylor Residence, the residence for black students at the University of Natal Black Section, called by black 74 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS students to discuss the formation of SASO, a group of white students – Halton Cheadle, Dave Hemson, Jennifer Brown and Veronica Vorster – left the venue. This small group of white students would later become key organisers of the NUSAS wages commissions in Durban and part of a group of student leaders who were close to Turner. They had been greeted at the door with the ironical ‘Hello Baas, Hello Missus!’ and referred to in the meeting as ‘intruders’ and ‘foreigners’. They left the meeting after being accused of being Security Branch spies.71 Hemson had no doubt about the reason for their treatment and he argued it ‘reflected the new spirit of black consciousness’. This admittedly isolated incident reflected the ambivalences within progressive movements, but also revealed tensions between white students, who had benefited from the system of apartheid, and their black counterparts, an elite group who were nonetheless conscious of their position at the bottom of apartheid’s racial hierarchy that placed whites at the top and Africans at the bottom. Despite such tensions, the NUSAS and SASO leadership maintained good relations. Innes, for example, remembered the importance of his conversations with Biko, at the 1967 Grahamstown NUSAS conference. As Biko observed, the accommodation of black delegates at the conference, at a church in the black location in Grahamstown, had ‘perhaps [been] the turning point in the history of black support for NUSAS. So appalling were the conditions that it showed the blacks just how valued they were in the organisation.’72 Innes recalls that he was profoundly challenged by Biko’s speech to the assembled NUSAS assembly in response to the situation, in which Biko called for a 24-hour hunger strike in protest and this was Innes’s first personal sacrifice for his anti-apartheid ideals. The real significance of the conference for Innes was the time Biko took to ‘help me understand how black people experienced apartheid’, a lesson he judges that was ‘invaluable in helping me to understand black oppression, not only socially and politically, but also psychologically and intellectually’.73 The shockwaves of Black Consciousness coincided with a power struggle within NUSAS, between radicals who sought more confrontational methods of engagement and conservative liberals, who sought to keep NUSAS committed to its position of symbolic protest. As early as its July 1969 congress in Cape Town, NUSAS Black Consciousness and Student Protest 75 members had begun to sense that their protests had not really achieved anything, signalling that the internal struggle between radical students and the more conservative liberals was shifting in favour of the former. A general feeling of impotence was reinforced by the SASO critique of NUSAS tactics as ‘protest after the fact’. At the July 1969 congress the students resolved ‘that in 1970 the structure and function of NUSAS would be reviewed’, based on an opinion poll among English and Afrikaans students,74 the most comprehensive ever conducted among students until that point. NUSAS’s change was a reflection of its new leadership, as Xolela Mangcu observes: ‘Innes’s presidency . . . was in the end a bridge to the more radical turn under Neville Curtis, who was elected in 1969–70.’75 Curtis hailed from a lower middle-class Johannesburg background; his father worked as a mine manager and in this sense he was different from most NUSAS leaders, who came from more privileged sections of society. Curtis ‘led white students in finding progressive responses to the challenge of BC [Black Consciousness]’ and ‘gave content to these responses through his tactical flexibility and strategic insight’.76 One sign that the dynamics were shifting in the favour of radicals took place at the University of the Witwatersrand, when in May 1970 radical leaders led 500 students in a march through Braamfontein to the notorious John Vorster Square, the headquarters of the Special Branch, to protest the detention of 22 activists under the Terrorism Act, without appeal to habeas corpus. Three hundred and fifty-seven students, including Glenn Moss, were arrested, photographed and fingerprinted, but later released.77 In responding to the protest, Biko condemned the perception that black students should support such protests, arguing: ‘We hold it in absolute arrogance . . . for any student leader from the privileged group to give a directive reading what black student leaders should do at times like these.’78 Two months after this event, NUSAS held its ‘Re-assessment Congress’ from 18 to 24 July 1970 at Eston, near Pietermaritzburg. The congress was informed by new thinking that was facilitated by smaller meetings in the lead-up to the congress. For example, Moss recalls attending a leadership retreat held in April 1970 at Redacres Mission, near Howick in Natal, that must have shaped the thinking of students and impacted on the subsequent Eston conference. Moss recalls the presence of Biko, Curtis and Turner at the retreat. The SASO critique, 76 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS which seems to have been part of the opinion poll conducted in the run-up to the congress, added substance to the original critique of NUSAS’s ‘after the fact’ protests:

The aims of NUSAS as they stand on Black and White might be alright but . . . NUSAS has no programme of action. Instead of having long-term offensive programmes NUSAS has relegated itself to the role of publicity seekers, whose effectiveness is very little. NUSAS protests are also opportunist programmes. Nobody doubts the sincerity of at least some of the students but to reveal oneself only in protest after the fact and keep quiet during the rest of the year shows a grave lack of principled programme of real clarity about one’s goals and how to achieve them.79

The congress took place immediately after the first SASO General Students’ Council (discussed in Chapter 1), and as the South African Institute of Race Relations’ survey for 1970 observed: ‘The SASO decisions were, thus, of much significance.’80 In reality, the congress was a bitter contest over tactics and the role of NUSAS. As Mangcu writes, the sticking point at the congress was a motion put forward by another young radical from an Afrikaans background, Paul Pretorius, that NUSAS should recognise ‘SASO as the body best able to represent the views and needs of black students in South Africa’.81 According to Mangcu, this motion threatened to split the congress, as Ken Costa of the University of the Witwatersrand and Deon Irish of the University of Cape Town threatened to pull out of the congress should the motion be passed. In the end Curtis, as NUSAS president, advised that the motion be withdrawn and then replaced the wording, stating that SASO was instead ‘well able to’ represent the views and needs of black students. It was to be a moment that put the more conservative elements of NUSAS into stark relief with its new radicals. Biko, who was at the congress, recognised that a line had been drawn and after scribbling a note to Pretorius (the content of which we can only guess), got up and left the congress.82 SASO had in fact pre-empted NUSAS by withdrawing recognition of the organisation as the legitimate national student union, at that Black Consciousness and Student Protest 77 time the oldest student organisation in the country, established in Bloemfontein in 1924.83 In a letter dated 2 November 1970, SASO communicated the decision of its July 1970 conference – that black students had withdrawn their ‘recognition of NUSAS as a true National Union’ and instructed the NUSAS executive to ‘continue studying the relevance of the organisation to the black student community and to maintain such contact as is compatible with the aims of SASO’.84 The reason for this decision, as the secretary communicated, was fivefold: the ‘emancipation of the black peoples’ depended ‘entirely on the role the black peoples themselves are prepared to play’; black students should prioritise their position in relation to their broader community; black students could never realise their aspirations in NUSAS as it stood; NUSAS was but a national union in name; and only ‘a few individuals’ were truly committed to the principles of NUSAS.85 The position of SASO was more clearly and forcefully stated at the start of the South African academic year, in January 1971, just over a year and a half after SASO’s official launch. The Abe Bailey Institute at the University of Cape Town invited student delegates in South Africa, including NUSAS leaders and Biko and Pityana of SASO, to meet to present and discuss papers on student politics in South Africa. The conference drew representatives from the normally aloof Afrikaanse Studentebond, which had undergone a bitter verligte- verkrampte split in 1967.86 In 1969, the Afrikaanse Studentebond executive had voiced its support for ‘personal contact with non-white students on an official level’, although the president, Johan Fick, a University of Pretoria student, specified this should occur ‘in a spirit of segregation’ to consult one another on specific issues.87 Later, Biko remembered the conference as an occasion where he met Fick and other Afrikaans students, who reportedly recognised the similarity of Black Consciousness with Afrikaner nationalism and said, ‘We wish you guys well.’ Although the Afrikaanse Studentebond enthusiasm for Black Consciousness was no doubt because its leaders perceived it to feed into separate development, the relationship between Biko and Fick lasted until at least 1976, when its revolutionary challenge could no longer be doubted.88 Pityana’s paper, ‘Power and Social Change in South Africa’, drew on his impressively wide reading, including Edgar Brookes, Verwoerd, 78 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

Biko, Frantz Fanon, George Orwell, Alexis de Tocqueville and C.W. de Kiewiet, to argue the need for blacks to engage in ‘a complete overhaul of the system’, which was necessary for ‘a clearer vision of the future’. The solution was ‘not through a directionless and arrogant multi-racialism’, but ‘a purposeful and positive unilateral approach. Black man, you are on your own.’89 Biko’s paper, ‘White Racism and Black Consciousness’, began by citing Aimé Césaire and observed that the ‘biggest mistake the Black world ever made was to assume that whoever opposed apartheid was an ally’ and, among a number of memorable phrases, included observations such as: ‘The myth of integration as propounded under the banner of liberal ideology must be cracked and killed’ for the reason that it presented itself as a viable alternative to discrimination, but was ‘a soporific to the Blacks while salving the consciences of guilt-stricken Whites’.90 As a result of the dead end of liberal politics and the need for a response from blacks, Biko posited the importance of SASO, not in and of itself as a student organisation, but as ‘a new approach’ that had ‘opened a huge crack in the traditional approach and made the Black sit-up and think again’. It was premised on the realisation that blacks needed to use ‘the concept of group power . . . to build a strong foundation’.91 The Abe Bailey conference proved to be a very rare moment of dialogue of students across the spectrum of student organisations, a broad tabling of positions that never took place again in the 1970s, to my knowledge. Quite ironically as a multiracial event, it also proved to be particularly useful for Biko and Pityana to refine their ideas. SASO activist and student at Durban Medical School Mamphela Ramphele remembers that Biko’s paper provided him with an opportunity to formalise his ideas.92 Biko’s biographer, Lindy Wilson, quotes Pityana as saying that the papers were ‘a major refinement of what we were doing’ and were a synthesis of the conversations Biko and Pityana had during the course of 1970. According to Pityana:

There was a lot there between us that was actually a result of conversations and writing and sharing and thinking through precisely how you present in a hostile, in an ambiguous and uncertain climate, something positive and, in our view, certain. We felt certain of the capacity of black people to participate in Black Consciousness and Student Protest 79

their own struggle but that needed to be said in a challenging and in a critical way.93

In Pityana’s retrospective words, their message needed to be ‘said in a challenging and critical way’. Pityana’s comments indicate that Black Consciousness was constituted in contradistinction with its inter- locutors, rather than in isolation, and that the dialogue was facilitated by a shared space. Ramphele remembers that ‘in the preparation for their presentation a lot of their own thoughts were clarified, and their papers reflected a growing sense of confidence in the importance of their mission as student leaders and the role they were to play as liberators of their own people’.94 Biko later remembered that his paper at the Abe Bailey conference was ‘overkill, actually’, but it exemplified the mood of black students at the time.95 Pityana’s and Biko’s attendance at the conference embodied the paradoxes of the movement, which called for separation with white liberals and yet articulated these concerns at a multiracial conference in a way that resonated with the Afrikaner students in attendance. Theirs was a dialogue that called for separation; it was a South African dialogue, which presupposed the national entity of the South African state, while calling for a more radically just approach to race relations within it, an equal sharing of power. Such contradictions were to resonate in other spheres, as is examined in more detail later in the next two chapters. Paradoxes such as these created tensions within the movement itself as well. The papers were subsequently collected and published with a preface by the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, a close observer and adviser to students at the University of California, Berkeley, during the student protests of 1964 to 1965. Lipset dramatically judged the papers to outweigh the significance of the rapidly growing literature published in the wake of the May 1968 protests in France, as well as the activities of American student movements in the 1960s, for the reason that they stood to influence a struggle that was still playing out, in a way that the retrospective literature on the international protests could not hope to do.96 The implied student solidarity of the conference was problematic for SASO policy though. Saths Cooper, the secretary of the Black Consciousness-affiliated and student-run Theatre Council of Natal, 80 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS dismissed Lipset’s claim and most of the contributions, bar Pityana’s and Biko’s, for their bias towards white South African attitudes and outlooks, in a scathing review in the SASO Newsletter.97 SASO and Black Consciousness needed to be distanced from a generalised student solidarity to assert the unique need for black solidarity. Under the repression of the apartheid state, activists could not afford to lose sight of the nature of their struggle. Biko eloquently captured the nature of such a distinction between white and black activists when he observed that whites could always opt out of their opposition to the state and enjoy the privileges accorded them by virtue of their race, whereas such an option was never open to blacks, who remained in a legislatively conflictual relationship to the state, whether they liked it or not. As a result of its reassessment, in 1971 the NUSAS executive restructured the organisation into three separate affiliate bodies: Aquarius (for culture), NUSED (for education) and NUSWEL (for social welfare). The aim was to ‘expand’ NUSAS’s ‘activities into specific areas of relevance’, to signal ‘a change in emphasis in NUSAS from talk to action’, as well as marking a withdrawal from black politics and instead a direct engagement with white society. The purpose of the new bodies was to work together, with NUSAS as the overall co-ordinating body, to influence and spread progressive ideas. Aquarius rejected ‘moribund materialism’ and the consumer culture of the previous generation, rather seeking to reflect ‘more humane moral beliefs’, which it sought to spread through popular culture, using song, poetry and drama. NUSED, mirroring student protests in Britain, protested against the ‘tyranny of examinations’ and called for an ‘education that liberates rather than oppresses’ and that opens new ways of thinking. NUSWEL looked to engage students by bringing them into a closer relationship with the wider community and took on the radical impulse to ‘tackle problems at their roots, not just their symptoms’. Together, the executive envisaged that the affiliate organisations and NUSAS would become an ‘outwards movement’ that sought to overcome the individual isolation of campuses and to challenge the state-imposed ‘racial and language barriers’.98 NUSAS’s restructuring resonated in particular with broader cultural changes in English-speaking youth in South Africa at the time and Black Consciousness and Student Protest 81 meshed particularly with feelings of cultural dislocation and distance, traits notably characteristic of South African Anglo identity.99 Most significant of NUSAS’s attempts to create such an outward movement was its involvement in the wages commissions.100 On the national level, NUSAS was responsive to new challenges; at its July 1972 conference NUSAS delegates passed a motion that welcomed the decision by the Rand Daily Mail, Daily Dispatch and SAIRR to replace the term ‘non- white’ with ‘black’, a decision the conference regarded as ‘a valuable contribution to race relations’ and urged other public bodies and newspapers to do the same.101 The changes that the NUSAS executive implemented in 1971 reflected a wider moment of reassessment and re-evaluation of strategy that the emergence of Black Consciousness engendered. NUSAS president Neville Curtis and deputy president Paul Pretorius emphasised in 1971 that at its annual conference the previous year, NUSAS had ‘welcomed the formation of SASO’ and saw the emergence of Black Consciousness as ‘a source of power inextricably bound up with the struggle for freedom in South Africa’. They further emphasised that Black Consciousness and non-racialism could be maintained together as separate but complimentary political goals, ‘the active practice of non-racialism in this racial society will continue side by side with an emerging black consciousness as they were [sic] towards a common goal’.102 In the NUSAS newsletter of that year, Curtis explained that ‘the new ideas which emerged in reassessment are being carried further’. Students were concerned now with ‘the total transformation of society and its values’, the implications of which, ‘were being evaluated in economic, moral, cultural and social as well as political terms’.103 Curtis remarked on the growing importance of the youth as ‘a force for change’ and the influence of ‘a radical awareness’ that had supplanted the older liberal paradigm, which allowed a better sense of society as a whole and racism in ‘all spheres’. In March 1971, Curtis was interviewed by the University of the Witwatersrand’s newspaper. There was an element of premonition in his remarks, as he observed that ‘the Black campuses of South Africa are the most exciting’.104 The following year those campuses were to erupt in student protests. SASO also moved ahead with its programmes. In July 1971, it held its second General Students’ Council, again at the Alan Taylor Residence 82 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS in Durban. It had decided against Fort Hare, where the conference was going to be held, as the rector had refused Pityana entry to the campus, as he was one of the 21 students suspended from the institution after the 1968 sit-in. C.M.C. Ndamse, the Transkei minister of roads and works, gave the opening address, ‘The Burden and Glory of Youth’. Pityana explained Ndamse’s invitation on the basis that he was black first and only a ‘reluctant pawn’ in the system,105 indicating somewhat of a more open approach to the question of Bantustan politicians in contrast to a later hardening towards them. The General Students’ Council hosted a symposium on separate development, at which the Coloured Afrikaans philosopher and poet Adam Small presented a paper on ‘Blackness versus Nihilism’ that explained his embrace of blackness in opposition to what he described as a nihilistic white society.106 Perhaps the first black philosopher to teach at a university in South Africa, Pityana credits Small with having ‘laid the philosophical and conceptual basis for Black consciousness’ through his paper at the symposium, a remark that must be placed in context, as philosopher Ernst Wolff notes, but nonetheless points to another interlocutor who provided valuable input into the formulation of Black Consciousness at an early stage.107 In comment on the General Students’ Council, the editor of the SASO Newsletter observed that ‘even now the White liberal is slowly beginning to realise that this [Black Consciousness] is a course that cannot be altered and that they (the White liberals) have to re-examine themselves in respect to their role in their own society’. In this context the editor noted approvingly of a white consciousness group in the UCM, but also criticised some for ‘displaying signs of emotional hysterics’ as well as those who refused to ‘step down quietly from the platform and retreat into the ranks of the Whiteman where the real problem lies’. ‘Introspection and re-direction of themselves are the only steps the “liberal” can take,’ the editor argued.108 At the General Students’ Council, SASO launched a manifesto that crystallised its stand on a number of issues. Its first principle was that SASO was a black student organisation that sought ‘the liberation of the Black man . . . from psychological oppression by themselves’ and ‘from physical oppression’, a result of ‘living in a White racist society’. Its second principle defined black people as those ‘discriminated against as a group’ in South Africa and who identified themselves ‘as a Black Consciousness and Student Protest 83 unit in the struggle’ for liberation. Its third point posited the belief that South Africa would be ‘a country in which both Black and White live and shall continue to live together’, that ‘the Whiteman must be made aware that one is either part of the solution or part of the problem’, but as a result of their choice of privilege and support for apartheid, whites had ‘defined themselves as part of the problem’. Therefore, the manifesto judged that whites needed to be excluded ‘in all matters relating to the struggle towards realizing our aspirations’ and that although this did not equate with ‘anti-Whitism (sic)’, personal contact with whites was ‘discouraged, especially where it tends to militate against the beliefs we hold dear’.109 The manifesto went on to give a detailed delineation of what Black Consciousness was. It was first and foremost ‘the most logical and significant means of ridding ourselves of the shackles that bind us to perpetual servitude’. Black Consciousness was ‘an attitude of mind, a way of life’ that called for a rejection of ‘all value systems’ that alienated black people; self-definition; ‘group cohesion and solidarity’ and ‘totality of involvement of the oppressed people’. In an adaption of the Black Panther philosophy, as Sono later argued, the manifesto called on black people to ‘first close their ranks’ to oppose white racism, in order to join an ‘open society’ from ‘a position of strength’. Crucially, it argued, that ‘a truly open society can only be achieved by Blacks’. The manifesto then gave a definition of what integration was. It was something that would flow naturally from a just society and could never be equated with ‘assimilation of Blacks into an already established set of norms’ as conceived of by one section, white society. It rejected the claims of liberal groups, such as the ‘Progressive Party and other Liberal institutions’, to work towards the end of a just society, observing that these rather attempted to relax oppressive elements in the existing system, ‘to allow Blacks into a White-type society’, which was clearly unacceptable.110

Turfloop, Tiro and the 1972 university strikes As already noted, the University of the North was one of the most important centres for support of SASO, a point supported most recently by Anne Heffernan.111 Built 30 kilometres east of the regional capital, Pietersburg, the university college kept the name of the farm on which 84 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS it was built, Turfloop. Students at Turfloop had shown considerable courage in opposing their administration. Initially placed under the trusteeship of the University of South Africa, it was conferred the status of a university in 1970.112 The university was touted with pride as a flagship institution of the state’s development along separate lines, intended to serve Sotho-, Venda- and Tsonga-speaking students. Turfloop students were not to be cowed, though, and boycotted the inauguration in September 1970 of the first chancellor of the university and the celebrations, which the Turfloop SRC president Abram Onkgopotse Tiro deemed to be ‘another calculated move by the Government to drive the Non-white students into a life of isolation, despair and perpetual frustration’.113 Tiro hailed from a village called Dinokana and had been ‘exposed to political protest at a very early age’, when in 1957 ‘thousands of women in Lehurutshe and Dinokana protested against the introduction of for women’ and closed his primary school.114 This discontent bubbled beneath the surface, but burst into the open on 29 April 1972, when Tiro initiated a countrywide boycott of the bush universities. He was expelled by the university administration following his thunderous and eloquent denunciation of Bantu Education before no less than the entire university and the rector at the university graduation ceremony.115 In his speech, Tiro sought to speak truth to power and truth for him meant ‘practical reality’. Tiro pointed out the inconsistencies of Bantu Education and emphasised the unfairness of its application in a way that failed to ‘adhere to the letter and spirit’ of the policy. The proper role of black students, called ‘by virtue of our age and academic standing’ was ‘to greater responsibilities in the liberation of our people’. Where nationalism was awakened ‘among the intelligentsia it becomes the vanguard in the struggle against alien rule’, he reminded the audience. ‘If your education is not linked with the entire continent of Africa it is meaningless,’ Tiro concluded.116 In response to this open condemnation of the whole edifice of Bantu Education, Tiro was not surprisingly expelled on 2 May. G.M. Nkondo, a senior lecturer at Turfloop and the chairman of the Black Academic Staff Association, subsequently observed that the reason given by the university for Tiro’s expulsion was that he had chosen ‘the wrong occasion to give the type of speech he gave, and Black Consciousness and Student Protest 85 so embarrassed the authorities’.117 The Turfloop students presented a petition to reinstate Tiro and, after this was rejected, they staged a sit- in at the university’s main hall. In response the university authorities suspended the SRC and banned student meetings. After eight hours the authorities announced that all 1 146 students were expelled. Police arrived with ‘riot sticks and dogs’ and, after they prevented access to toilets, food and water, the students finally relented and left the hall and were transported by train to Johannesburg’s Park Station. Attempts by parents of the students and 2 000 Soweto residents to negotiate with the rector, Professor J.C. Boshoff, were unsuccessful. Students were required to reapply by signing strict compliance forms that accepted Tiro’s expulsion and the suspension of the SRC and black organisations on campus. However, 22 members of the SRC were summarily expelled and not allowed to reapply, which led to a group of between 500 and 700 students leaving the campus for a second time.118 In response, participants at a SASO formation school at FEDSEM in Alice, over the weekend of 12–14 May, passed the ‘Alice Declaration’ that called on all black students ‘to force the institutions/universities to close down by boycotting lectures . . . on 1 June’ when Turfloop students were due to return to the university.119 Students did not wait for 1 June. On 9 May students at the University of the Western Cape boycotted lectures in support of the plight of students at Turfloop, which turned into a hunger strike. Reflecting growing support for SASO, after Pityana made a point of visiting the campus in 1971,120 students refused to heed a ban on the visit of the SASO president Jerry Modisane, which led to the rector, Professor N. Sieberhagen, calling the police to the campus. Indian students at the University of Durban-Westville had already organised a hunger strike and ‘partial boycott of lectures’ from 7 to 8 May. This escalated into a two-week boycott of lectures that drew ‘at least half the student body’.121 There was further protest action, some coinciding with the 1 June call, at the Springfield College of Education, M.L. Sultan Technical College, Transvaal College of Education, FEDSEM, University of Natal Black Section, Fort Hare and the University of Zululand.122 The May–June 1972 SASO Newsletter was released with a collage of news headlines of the recent student demonstrations, including headlines such as ‘Black Consciousness Increases Racial Discrimination’ and 86 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS stories about student sit-ins. As part of what Julian Brown has called SASO’s ‘reluctant embrace of protest’, SASO was forced to support the sit-ins and give a sense of leadership to what had largely been a spontaneous outburst.123 The editorial confidently stated: ‘To SASO – the voice of black students in South Africa – this is a major step towards the realisation of our goals.’ The remainder of the editorial struck a more realistic tone, as it cautioned students to prepare for the inevitable ‘aftermath of the boycotts. The drop-out rate; the failure rate and the victimization rate has and will continue to increase,’ the editor observed.124 The support of the students at Turfloop by Coloured and Indian students had been particularly gratifying. Aubrey Mokoena told students at Durban-Westville that their stand would ‘bind forever the Black Community – Coloured, Indian and African’.125 Modisane, the SASO president, observed that Tiro’s speech was ‘merely the tip of a huge iceberg’ of a fundamental condemnation of Bantu Education by the black community for its hypocrisy and obvious defrauding of black students in the name of education.126 The way in which the protests had come to an end was problematic, though, and Modisane laid the blame for the end of the protests at black institutions at the door of white students. Under the subheading ‘The White Student Crisis: Does it Relate to us?’ Modisane observed that the protests at white institutions had stolen the limelight from the protests at the black universities, exemplified by the so-called St George’s Cathedral incident. Police had attacked a picket of University of Cape Town students on the steps of the cathedral, beating some students inside the cathedral and arresting and prosecuting 138 people, including Theo Kotze, the chairman of the Cape branch of the Christian Institute, and Edward King, the Dean of the Cathedral.127 The incident was front-page news in all the major newspapers, as well as a separate incident at St Mary’s Cathedral, Johannesburg, where police attacked University of the Witwatersrand students demanding ‘food, family life, free education and decent living wages for all South Africans’.128 As a result, the struggles at black universities had been relegated to ‘minor reports in insignificant corners of the paper’. Modisane observed that in essence white student struggles had eclipsed black student struggles in the spirit of ‘anything you can do I can do better’. ‘When our struggle lost its “New value” the communication Black Consciousness and Student Protest 87 broke down and our struggle began to peter out.’ This was surely an instance of the liberal mindset, where ‘white students tried to fight on our behalf . . . The white liberal condescension once again proved itself true.’ The white struggle had ‘no connection’ to the black struggle – rather ‘each had its own aims; its own goals’.129 Here SASO leaders sought to clarify the exact limits of student solidarity. The message of Black Consciousness asserted the need to maintain a critical distance from white students and the implied generational unity. The struggle in South Africa was of a unique form and history, undeniably racialised, and not to be confused with the democratic struggles of Western democracies, and Black Consciousness sought to preserve the analytical priority of black solidarity.

New leadership and new directions in NUSAS Pretorius had been the vice president of NUSAS in 1971, under Neville Curtis. He was elected president for 1972. Only 22 years old at the time, Pretorius was a graduate of the University of Natal, where he had served on the SRC since 1968. Like Innes and Curtis, Pretorius proved to be open to the SASO position and willing to make adjustments to NUSAS as a result. Looking back at the ‘Re-assessment Congress’ two years later, somewhat selectively, as an elision of the divisions at the congress described by Mangcu reveals, Pretorius judged the delegates to have taken the critique by SASO to be ‘the most searching and valuable’ of any offered at the congress. Pretorius judged that as a result of the critique, the congress began to ‘question not only the premises that we had operated on in the sixties but also the values of a White capitalist society’. Surely revealing the growing influence of Turner, present and active at retreats like the one Moss visited at Redacres in 1970, who alerted students to the links between capitalism and apartheid, the writer of the fact sheet recognised that ‘before, students had rejected apartheid in society – now there were signs that society itself needed to be questioned and its values overhauled – White society that is’.130 Pretorius maintained what seems to have been a good working relationship with his SASO counterpart, Themba Sono, in 1971 and 1972. The NUSAS and SASO executives held a meeting in Durban on 8 January 1972, when, among other points of discussion, they agreed to co-operate on the establishment of a trust to administer medical 88 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS scholarships. They also discussed a leadership training programme and ‘decided unanimously that these programmes should remain separate and be conducted completely independently of the other organization’. In addition, it was decided ‘to continue a policy of personal contact between the members of both organisations and to continue an exchange of information and publications’.131 Writing to Justice Moloto on 4 April 1972, Pretorius said that he ‘would be the last to claim that NUSAS has no traces of hypocrisy within it’. But he felt that NUSAS policy towards SASO made it clear: ‘We do not claim to be fighting the black man’s battle for him – we will render assistance where and when it is asked for and attempt (often with futility) to do this according to our “principles” but essentially it is in the white society that our major efforts must lie.’132 Although Pretorius may have been the exception in such an open stance to the critique by SASO, in relating his message to students, he still appealed their collective responsibility on a nationwide basis. In a pamphlet addressed to ‘freshers’ (first-year university students), Pretorius argued that NUSAS was ‘concerned with the transformation of a sick education in a decadent society’. Under apartheid society, young people were ‘faced with a clear choice – action or acceptance’. NUSAS had ‘chosen the former course’, Pretorius observed. The pamphlet continued:

Guided by principle and a genuine concern for all the people of this country NUSAS had evolved a series of programmes and projects under the auspices of the three affiliate organisations, NUSED, NUSWEL and AQUARIUS, which offer you the opportunity to involve yourself positively in today’s real issues, in co-operation with students on a nationwide basis . . . We are a strong and growing sector of the young people of South Africa – we do have the power to change things – so get involved and use that power.133

Pretorius’s open stance to the separate need for white students to focus on white society and his simultaneous appeal that students co- operate on ‘a nationwide’ basis indicated some of the ambiguity in the response of NUSAS to SASO’s critique of its position. The need to abdicate its role to black students was not one that NUSAS could do as Black Consciousness and Student Protest 89 easily as it claimed. NUSAS was operating within a narrowing space, as the government took decisive steps against it. While initially the South African government interpreted Black Consciousness favourably as a rejection of the common society propounded by liberals, it gradually began to awaken to its latent threat by 1971 at least, which was confirmed when the link between SASO and the 1972 university strikes became apparent. The university revolts had forced SASO to reconsider its policy and to adopt more confrontational forms of protest.134 The state, for its part, was determined to root out the cancer of youth rebellion and the strikes across the black universities only served to confirm government fears of an errant student population. Such thinking was exemplified by Major-General P.J. Venter, the head of the South African Security Police, who in a presentation to a South African Bureau of Racial Affairs conference, averred attacks through ‘a terrorism of the brain’ on South Africa, using techniques developed in Soviet Russia, and cited the student disturbances in 1972 as the work of such ‘ideological terrorists’.135 Prime Minister Vorster initiated a commission of inquiry in Parliament on 10 February 1972, officially titled A Commission of Inquiry into Certain Organisations and headed by A.L. Schlebusch, to investigate the activities of the Christian Institute, the UCM, the SAIRR and NUSAS, which were judged to be probable culprits of such ‘ideological terrorism’.136 Organisations like the Anglican Students’ Federation and the NCFS escaped such indictment. The action of the Schlebusch Commission against the Christian Institute and the UCM, both under suspicion as ‘affected organisations,’ was the first overt action by the state against the church. Although the English-speaking churches had become increasingly critical of state policies, the state had until this point allowed the churches a measure of freedom. Activists responded differently to the parliamentary inquiry. Beyers Naudé, the chairman of the Christian Institute, and other members of the Christian Institute refused on principle to appear before a secret inquiry whose findings were kept hidden from the public and were charged as a result. The controversy-racked UCM executive, in the face of both this government crackdown and quiet withdrawal of support from the churches, decided to disband the organisation on 11 July 1972. 90 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

Conclusions The SASO manifesto of July 1971 had crystallised the idea that whites as a group had defined themselves as part of the problem and therefore needed to be ‘excluded’ in ‘all matters relating to the struggle’. The basis of SASO’s critique of NUSAS was its largely symbolic protests that took place ‘after the fact’ and were not accompanied with a strategic approach to changing white society. As a result, these protests only had symbolic value, even enhancing the image of South Africa abroad, as the contributor to the Cape Times, ‘Justitia’ had observed. The sit- in at the University of Cape Town had been a crucial radicalising moment for a small number of white students, although this sit-in was also critiqued by SASO. The subsequent Fort Hare sit-ins saw a high point of support by white students for the cause of black students, which was to be replicated again in 1972. But this solidarity was in fact undermining black students. In seeking to carve out a political space for themselves, SASO activists were therefore critical of NUSAS and white students’ attempts at solidarity and protest, and, indeed as Modisane had done, drew attention to the ways in which these protests had damaged the black cause in 1972. The protests at black institutions had forced SASO into a more open and confrontational approach to the state than it had initially planned. This challenge was mediated by a succession of receptive and open leaders in NUSAS in the form of Innes, Curtis and Pretorius, with whom Biko and SASO leaders engaged. As a result, they called on NUSAS to respect the call to leave the black campuses alone. Although Black Consciousness was directed at black students and the need to create a black power bloc that would fundamentally challenge the white power structure, as Pityana had argued at the Abe Bailey conference, the net effect of SASO’s ideas was to change the direction that NUSAS and an admittedly small number of white radicals took. Although they acknowledged they could never lead the struggle, this group could never abandon the idea of a nationwide cause, as Pretorius’s letter to university freshers stated. They still maintained they could render ‘assistance’, which as the next chapter shows, took particular shape in the form of trade unionism and centred in the city of Durban between 1970 and 1973. Black Consciousness and Student Protest 91

Notes 1. ‘Communique as Drawn up by the 1969 SASO Conference’. http://www. aluka.org/stable/10.5555/al.sff.document.mem19690700.032.008.743. 2. This chapter was first published as ‘Resonances of Youth and Tensions of Race: Liberal Student Politics, White Radicals and Black Consciousness, 1968–1973’, South African Historical Journal 65, no. 3 (2013): 365–82. 3. J. Brown, The Road to Soweto: Resistance and the Uprising of 16 June 1976 (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2016), chapters 1–3. 4. A. Dick, The Hidden History of South Africa’s Book and Reading Cultures (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 10. 5. H. Lunn, ‘ “Hippies, Radicals and the Sounds of Silence”: Cultural Dialectics at Two South African Universities, 1966–1976’, Ph.D. diss., University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2009, 2. 6. Lunn, ‘ “Hippies, Radicals” ’, 4–8. 7. M. Klimke and J. Scharloth, eds., 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956-1977 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 6. 8. Lunn, ‘ “Hippies, Radicals” ’, 1–2. 9. Cited in S. Dubow, Apartheid, 1958–1994 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 129. 10. M. Legassick and C. Saunders, ‘Aboveground Activity in the 1960s’, in The Road to Democracy in South Africa: Volume 1 (1960–1970), South African Democracy Education Trust (Cape Town: Zebra Press, 2004), 669. 11. P. Rich, Hope and Despair: English-Speaking Intellectuals and South African Politics 1896–1976 (London: British Academic Press, 1993), 99. 12. South African student activism occurs within what Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth have called a ‘long 1960s’, which they define as the period stretching from 1956 to 1977. They argue that ‘1968’ functions as a metaphor that captures a trajectory of transnational European protest and activism, encompassing such events as the 1956 Hungarian revolt, and extends to the climax of political ferment and terrorist activity in Germany and Italy in 1977. See Klimke and Scharloth, 1968 in Europe. 13. Lunn, ‘ “Hippies, Radicals” ’, 20. 14. S. Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility and White South Africa 1820–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 266. 15. For an excellent study, see C. McKay, ‘A History of the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), 1956–1970’, Ph.D. diss., University of South Africa, 2015. 16. T.G. Karis and G.M. Gerhart, eds., From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa 1882–1990, Volume 5: Nadir and Resurgence, 1964–1979 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 65–6. 92 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

17. M. Legassick, The National Union of South African Students (Los Angeles, African Studies Center, University of California 1967), cited in B. Kline, ‘The National Union of South African Students: A Case-Study of the Plight of Liberalism, 1924–77’, Journal of Modern African Studies 23, no. 1 (1985): 139. 18. T. Sono, Reflections on the Origins of Black Consciousness in South Africa (Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council, 1993), 22. 19. Karis and Gerhart, Nadir and Resurgence, 67–8. 20. Presidential Correspondence with Individuals and Certain Organisations (September–December 69), NUSAS Archive BC 586/A3.13, Special Collections, J.W. Jagger Building, University of Cape Town. 21. C.J. Driver, ‘Used to be Great Friends’, Granta 80 (Winter 2002), 7–26. 22. B. Keniston, Choosing to be Free: The Life Story of Rick Turner (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2013), 4. 23. Tony Morphet, cited in Keniston, Choosing to be Free, 17. 24. Supreme Court of South Africa (Transvaal Provincial Division), The State versus S. Cooper and Eight Others, Case No. 18/75/254 (Pretoria: Lubbe Recordings), 3005, Richard Turner Papers, E.G. Malherbe Library, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban. 25. T. Morphet, ‘Richard Turner: A Biographical Introduction’, in R. Turner, The Eye of the Needle: Towards Participatory Democracy in South Africa (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1980), xvi. 26. Barbara Follett, interview in Jann Turner’s documentary film,My Father, Rick Turner, http://www.barbara-follett.org.uk/richard_turner/part_1.html. The term ‘verligte’ was slippery in meaning, but broadly translated to mean ‘enlightened’ or ‘pragmatic’ and was coined by the Afrikaans intellectual W.A. de Klerk in 1967 (Dubow, Apartheid, 154). By 1974, however, Frederik van Zyl Slabbert criticised the usefulness of the term, impishly noting that in a poll conducted by the Afrikaans newspaper Rapport, 69 per cent of National Party supporters had identified themselves as ‘verlig’, H. van Zyl Slabbert, ‘Afrikaner Nationalism, White Politics and Political Change in South Africa’, African Studies Seminar Paper, no. 11 (March 1974), 16. http://146.141.12.21/handle/10539/9933. 27. Gijs Dubbeld, interview, Durban, 9 August 2008. 28. Republic of South Africa, Fourth Interim Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Certain Organisations, 91, Turner Papers. 29. Information on Oswin Magrath is drawn from P. Denis, ‘Magrath, Oswin, 1908 to 1998’. http://www.dacb.org/stories/southafrica/magrath-oswin. Magrath was transferred in 1956 to become rector of the Catholic seminary for black priests, St Peter’s Hammanskraal, north of Pretoria, of particular importance in the later development of Black Theology. Black Consciousness and Student Protest 93

30. P. Denis, The Dominican Friars in Southern Africa: A Social History, 1557–1990 (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 128–37, 265. 31. Raphael Kaplinsky, interview, Brighton, England, 11 August 2009. 32. Barbara Follet, e-mail communication, 8 February 2010. 33. Cited in L. Ntsebeza, ‘The Mafeje and UCT Saga: Unfinished Business?’, paper presented to the History and African Studies Seminar, Howard College, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 13 May 2009. http://www. kznhass-history.net/files/seminars/Ntsebeza2009.pdf. 34. M. Plaut, ‘South African Student Protest, 1968: Remembering the Mafeje Sit-in’, History Workshop Journal 69 (2010), 200. 35. Cited in Ntsebeza, ‘Mafeje and UCT Saga’. See also M. Horrell, A Survey of Race Relations in South Africa, 1968 (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1969), 263. 36. Horrell, Survey of Race Relations, 1968, 263. 37. Cited in Ntsebeza, ‘Mafeje and UCT Saga’. 38. Cited in R. Erbmann, ‘ “Conservative Revolutionaries”: Anti-apartheid Activism at the University of Cape Town 1963–1973’, BA Hons thesis, Oxford University, 2005, Chapter 2. 39. Follett, interview in Turner, My Father, Rick Turner. 40. Jeremy Cronin, interview in Turner, My Father, Rick Turner. 41. Horrell, Survey of Race Relations, 1968, 266. 42. In contrast, Hughes notes that the Warwick and MIT sit-ins, in which he was subsequently involved, were mobilised around comparatively ‘frivolous’ issues, the Vietnam War being an exception. K. Hughes, ‘Lessons of the Great UCT Sit-in of 1968’, unpublished manuscript. My thanks to Raphael Kaplinsky for providing me with a copy. 43. Horrell, Survey of Race Relations, 1968, 265. 44. M.A. Beale, ‘Apartheid and University Education, 1948–1970’, Ph.D. diss., University of the Witwatersrand, 1998, 397. 45. Beale, ‘Apartheid and University Education’, 397. 46. Cape Times, 23 August 1968. 47. Cited in J. Brown, ‘SASO’s Reluctant Embrace of Public Forms of Protest, 1968–1972’, South African Historical Journal 62, no. 4 (2010): 720. 48. ‘Appendix B: Fort Hare Crisis, Barry Streek to SRC Presidents, 10 September 1968’. http://www.sahistory.org.za/sites/default/files/DC/rep19680910. 026.022.000/rep19680910.026.022.000.pdf. 49. P. Denis and G. Duncan, The Native School That Caused All the Trouble: A History of the Federal Theological Seminary of Southern Africa (Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 2011). 50. Cited in Beale, ‘Apartheid and University Education’, 405. 94 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

51. Horrell, Survey of Race Relations, 1968, 266. 52. Cited in Beale, ‘Apartheid and University Education’, 410. 53. Information is taken from ‘Appendix B: Fort Hare Crisis, Fact Sheet No. 5/68–69 “Fort Hare Affair” ’, 1–2. http://www.sahistory.org.za/sites/ default/files/DC/rep19680910.026.022.000/rep19680910.026.022.000. pdf. 54. ‘Fort Hare Affair’, 2. 55. ‘Fort Hare Affair’, 2–3. 56. ‘Fort Hare Affair’, 3–4. 57. B. Pityana, ‘D.C.S. Oosthuizen Academic Freedom Memorial Lecture’, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, 18 September 2008, 2. http://www. dcsoosthuizen.blogspot.co.za/p/memorial-lectures.html. 58. Pityana, ‘D.C.S. Oosthuizen Academic Freedom Memorial Lecture’, 4–5. 59. ‘Barry Streek to SRC Presidents, 10 September 1968’. 60. ‘Appendix B: Fort Hare Crisis, Innes to SRC Presidents, 20 September 1968’, 2. http://www.sahistory.org.za/sites/default/files/DC/rep19680910. 026.022.000/rep19680910.026.022.000.pdf. 61. ‘Innes to SRC Presidents, 20 September 1968’, 2. 62. ‘Innes to SRC Presidents, 20 September 1968’, 4. 63. ‘Innes to SRC Presidents, 20 September 1968’, 5. 64. ‘Appendix B: Fort Hare Crisis, B. Streek to SRC Presidents, 8 November 1968, Fact Sheet no. 7/1968/69, “Diary of the Sequel to Fort Hare Sit-in” ’. http:// www.sahistory.org.za/sites/default/files/DC/rep19680910.026.022.000/ rep19680910.026.022.000.pdf. 65. ‘Diary of the Sequel to Fort Hare Sit-in’. 66. Horrell, Survey of Race Relations, 1968, 268. 67. ‘Appendix B: Fort Hare Crisis, D. Innes, Press release, 2/69, 14 April 1969, 1–2. http://www.sahistory.org.za/sites/default/files/DC/rep19680910. 026.022.000/rep19680910.026.022.000.pdf. 68. X. Mangcu, Biko: A Biography (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2012), 129. 69. D. Innes, Our Country, Our Responsibility (London: The Africa Bureau, 1969), 15. 70. S. Biko, I Write What I Like (Johannesburg: Picador Africa, 2004), 5. 71. ‘Black Power: Students Forced to Leave Meeting’, first published in Dome (University of Natal), 27 March 1969, republished in Karis and Gerhart, Nadir and Resurgence, 458–9. 72. Biko, I Write, 12. 73. D. Innes, ‘A White Man Remembers’, in We Write What we Like: Celebrating Steve Biko, ed. C. van Wyk (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2007), 110. Black Consciousness and Student Protest 95

74. M. Horrell, A Survey of Race Relations in South Africa, 1969 (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1970), 221. 75. Mangcu, Biko, 136. 76. G. Moss, The New Radicals: A Generational Memoir of the 1970s (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2014), 35. 77. Moss, New Radicals, 23–7. ‘A Brief History of Student Action in South Africa’, 8. http://www.disa.ukzn.ac.za/webpages/DC/rep19720000.026.022.000/ rep19720000.026.022.000.pdf. 78. Cited in Brown, ‘SASO’s Reluctant Embrace’, 719. 79. Circular from Paul Pretorius to SRC presidents, NUSAS exec, NUSAS branches, Fact Sheet No. 4, 2 February 1972, 2, UCT BC 586/A3.15, Special Collections, J.W. Jagger Building, University of Cape Town. 80. M. Horrell, A Survey of Race Relations in South Africa, 1970 (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1971), 247. 81. Mangcu, Biko, 143. 82. Mangcu, Biko, 145. 83. Dubow, Apartheid, 161. 84. ‘Letter from the Secretary of SASO to the President of NUSAS’, 2 November 1970, 1–2. https://www.aluka.org/stable/10.5555/al.sff.document.let 19701102.032.009.744?searchUri=so%3Dps_B2%2BNovember% 2B1970 %252C%2B1%25E2%2580%25932. 85. ‘Letter from the Secretary of SASO to the President of NUSAS’, 1. 86. Beale, ‘Apartheid and University Education’, 399 ff. 87. Cited in Horrell, Survey of Race Relations in South Africa,1969, 222. 88. M. Arnold, ed., Steve Biko: Black Consciousness in South Africa (New York: Random House, 1979), 144. 89. B. Pityana, ‘Power and Social Change in South Africa’, in Student Perspectives on South Africa, ed. H. van der Merwe and D. Welsh (Cape Town: David Philip, 1972), 189. 90. Biko, ‘White Racism and Black Consciousness’, in Student Perspectives on South Africa, ed. H. van der Merwe and D. Welsh (Cape Town: David Philip, 1972), 192, 193. 91. Biko, ‘White Racism’, 197. 92. M. Ramphele, Across Boundaries: The Journey of a South African Woman Leader (New York: The Feminist Press, 1996), 59. 93. In L. Wilson, ‘Bantu Stephen Biko: A Life’, in Bounds of Possibility: The Legacy of Steve Biko and Black Consciousness, ed. B. Pityana, M. Ramphele, M. Mpumlwana and L. Wilson (Cape Town: David Philip, 1991), 26–7. 94. Ramphele, Across Boundaries, 59. 96 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

95. D. Woods, Biko (London: Paddington Press, 1978), 54. According to Woods, Biko later conceded to him that the paper had been written in the ‘heat of his early twenties’ and claimed not to ‘reject liberalism as such or white liberals as such. I reject only the concept that black liberation can be achieved through the leadership of white liberals.’ 96. S. Lipset, ‘Preface’, in Student Perspectives on South Africa, ed. H. van der Merwe and D. Welsh (Cape Town: David Philip, 1972), 1–7. 97. SASO Newsletter 2, no. 2 (March/April 1972): 12. https://www.aluka.org/ stable/10.5555/al.sff.document.1681.5777.002.002.mar1972?searchUri =so%3Dps_collection_name_Query%3DSASO%2BNewsletter%2B %2528March%252FApril%2B1972. 98. P. Pretorius, ‘Where to Now White Student?’ Paper presented to NUSAS seminar, April 1972. https://www.aluka.org/stable/10.5555/al.sff. documentcnf19720400.026.009.577?searchUri=so%3Dpscollectionname_ str%2Basc%26Query%3Dwhere%2Bto%2Bnow%2Bwhite%2Bstudent. 99. Lunn, ‘ “Hippies, Radicals” ’. 100. For discussions, see G. Davie, ‘Strength in Numbers: The Durban Student Wages Commission, Dockworkers and the Poverty Datum Line, 1971– 1973’, Journal of Southern African Studies 33, no. 2 (June 2007): 401–20; S. Friedman, Building Tomorrow Today: African Workers in Trade Unions, 1970– 1984 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1987); H. Keal, ‘ “A Life’s Work”: Harriet Bolton and Durban’s Trade Unions, 1944–1974’, Master’s thesis, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2009. 101. ‘Minutes of the 48th Annual Congress of the National Union of South African Students, University of Cape Town, 3–15 July 1972’. https://www. aluka.org/stable/10.5555/al.sff.document.min19720703.026.022.000? searchUri=so%3Dps_collection_name_Congress%252C%2B3%2B% 25E2%2580% 2593%2B15%2BJuly%2B1972. The opening address to the congress was given by Rev. Theo Kotze, head of the Cape branch of the Christian Institute. 102. Letter from Neville Curtis to Overseas National Unions, 7 June 1971, 2, BC586 (B4.2 1971), Manuscripts and Archives Department, University of Cape Town Libraries. 103. Letter from Neville Curtis to Overseas National Unions, 3. 104. Wits Student , 19 March 1971. 105. SASO Newsletter 1, no. 3 (August 1971), 3. https://www.aluka.org/ stable/10.5555/al.sff.document.1681.5777.001.002.jun1971?searchUri= so%3Dps_collection_name_SO%2BNewsletter%2B1%252C%2Bno. %2B2% 2B%2528August%2B1971. 106. A. Small, ‘Blackness versus Nihilsim’, SASO Newsletter 1, no. 3 (August 1971): 14–16. Black Consciousness and Student Protest 97

107. E. Wolff, ‘Adam Small’s Shade of Black Consciousness’, in #MustFall: Understanding the Moment, ed. L. Praeg and L. Lange (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, forthcoming). 108. ‘Editorial’, SASO Newsletter 1, no. 3 (August 1971): 2. 109. ‘SASO Manifesto’, SASO Newsletter 1, no. 3 (August 1971): 10–11. 110. ‘SASO Manifesto’: 10–11. 111. A. Heffernan, ‘Black Consciousness’s Lost Leader: Abraham Tiro, the University of the North, and the Seeds of South Africa’s Student Movement in the 1970s’, Journal of Southern African Studies 41, no. 1 (2015): 173–86. 112. ‘University of Limpopo: Historical Background’. http://www.ul.ac.za/ index.php?Entity=UL%20Historical%20Background. 113. Cited in A. Heffernan, ‘A History of Youth Politics in Limpopo, 1967– 2003’, D.Phil. diss., University of Oxford, 2014), 59. 114. Heffernan, ‘Black Consciousness’s Lost Leader’, 175. 115. Tiro was later assassinated on 1 February 1974 in Botswana by a parcel bomb. 116. O.R. Tiro, ‘Bantu Education’, in Turfloop Testimony: The Dilemma of a Black University in South Africa, ed. G.M. Nkondo (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1976), 92–3. 117. G.M. Nkondo, ed., Turfloop Testimony: The Dilemma of a Black University in South Africa (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1976), 4. 118. M. Horrell, D. Horner, and J. Kane-Berman, A Survey of Race Relations in South Africa, 1971 (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1972), 387–88. 119. Karis and Gerhart, Nadir and Resurgence, 126, 499. 120. At the University of the Western Cape there was a tense interplay with the history of the Non-European Unity Movement, the Association of Young Africa and the Black Consciousness Movement. See C.C. Thomas, ‘Disaffection, Identity, Black Consciousness and a New Rector: An Exploratory Take on Student Activism at the University of the Western Cape, 1966–1976’, South African Historical Journal 54 (2005): 72–90 and also E. Messina, ‘Swartbewustheid in Die Wes-Kaap 1970–1984’, Ph.D. diss., University of the Western Cape, 1995. 121. M. Horrell, D. Horner, J. Kane-Berman and R. Margo, A Survey of Race Relations in South Africa, 1972 (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1973), 390. 122. Horrell, et al., Survey of Race Relations, 1972, 390–1. 123. Brown, ‘SASO’s Reluctant Embrace’, 716–34. 124. ‘Editorial’, SASO Newsletter 2, no. 3 (May/June 1972). https://www.aluka.org/ stable/10.5555/al.sff.document.1681.5777.002.003may1972?searchUri= 98 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

so%3Dps_collection_BNewsletter%2B2%252C%2Bno.%2B3%2BMay %252FJune%2B1972. 125. SASO Newsletter 2, no. 3 (May/June 1972): 1 126. SASO Newsletter 2, no. 3 (May/June 1972): 8. 127. Legassick and Saunders, ‘Aspects of Aboveground Activity’, 854. 128. Race Relations News 34 (6 June 1972): 2. 129. SASO Newsletter 2, no. 3 (May/June 1972): 9. 130. ‘NUSAS Fact Sheet No. 4’, 3. UCT NUSAS Archive BC 586/A3.15, Special Collections, J.W. Jagger Building, University of Cape Town. 131. Joint Letter to Lars-Gunnar Eriksen from Themba Sono and Paul Pretorius, 10 January 1972, UCT NUSAS Archive BC 586/A3.15, Special Collections, J.W. Jagger Building, University of Cape Town. 132. Letter from Paul Pretorius to Justice Moloto, 4 April 1972, UCT NUSAS Archive BC 586/A3.15, Special Collections, J.W. Jagger Building, University of Cape Town. 133. Fresher’s Pamphlet: President’s Message, UCT NUSAS Archive BC 586/ A3.15, Special Collections, J.W. Jagger Building, University of Cape Town. 134. This point is made strongly in J. Brown, ‘Public Protest and Violence in South Africa, 1948–1976’, D.Phil. diss., University of Oxford, 2009, 146–78 and in D. Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968–1977 (Athens: Ohio University Press; Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2010), 140–58. 135. Horrell, et al., Survey of Race Relations, 1972, 56. 136. M. Lobban, White Man’s Justice: South African Political Trials in the Black Consciousness Era (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 82–6. The ‘Durban Moment’, 1970–1974 99

Chapter 3

The ‘Durban Moment’, 1970–1974

In an important sense both whites and blacks are oppressed, though in different ways, by a social system which perpetuates itself by creating white lords and black slaves, and no full human beings. ––– Richard Turner, ‘Black Consciousness and White Liberals’

t is quite likely that Steve Biko and Rick Turner knew each other Ibefore Turner moved to Durban at the beginning of 1970 – if not personally, then at least by reputation.1 Turner had returned to South Africa in 1966 and had been involved in the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) at the same time that Biko was ‘prominent’ in the organisation, ‘during the period 1965–67’.2 In this sense, Biko had been primed to critique NUSAS as an insider. Since 1966 Biko had been studying for his medical degree at the University of Natal [Medical School] Non-European Section (UNNE).3 Among the activists in the Durban area, Biko and Turner stood most prominent in their breadth and force of intellect. It was their strategies and respective ideas that, in effect, set the terms of discussion and radical action. This chapter seeks to demonstrate how their collective force of personality shaped the thinking of activists around them, how they influenced one another and how their creative collaboration lent itself to the refining of a political strategy. Activist, academic and Turner’s friend Tony Morphet coined the term the ‘Durban Moment’ in his Rick Turner Memorial Lecture at the University of Natal in Durban on 27 September 1990.4 He used the term to describe four simultaneous intellectual projects taking place in the city between 1970 and 1974. These were: Turner’s philosophical and political work; Biko’s formulation of

99 100 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS the philosophy and political discourse of Black Consciousness and its community development projects; Dunbar Moodie’s historical re- evaluation of Afrikaner history; and Mike Kirkwood’s challenge to the English literature canon from a South African perspective. Together, these projects signalled a ‘structural shift in the received intellectual patterns of the social world’ and were matched by stirrings in the black working class in the ‘unpredicted, unexpected and revelatory 1973 Durban strikes’.5 This chapter looks to give historical detail to the ‘Durban Moment’ and the argument foregrounds the first two projects: Turner’s and Biko’s philosophical and political contributions. The breakaway of the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) from NUSAS and the percolation of a mood of black independence through black churches and students had created a hiatus in the gradualism and moderate political reform envisioned by South African liberals. The need for radical change challenged the paternalist mindset so long a feature of liberal thinking. It was this ‘problem of change’ that formed the main theme in the contestations, debates and dialogues that were central aspects of the intellectual milieu, which filtered down to revitalise the trade union movement and changed the lives of a small number of young adults who chose to embark on roles as trade union advisers.6 Although the emergence of Black Consciousness in South Africa played a central role in effectively challenging the white liberal world view, it was mediated through interpersonal dialogue and relationships. For white activists, this entailed a shift to radicalism in the form of class theory, an admittedly still problematic position as will become apparent.7 The moment in Durban between 1970 and 1974 bore the defining characteristics that Doreen Massey emphasises in her discussion of space: multiplicity, dynamic interrelationships and a sphere in which ‘distinct trajectories’ co-existed.8 In this sense, Durban followed a long sociological pattern. John Rajchman has observed a distinct relationship between the city and the production of philosophy, in which philosophy is ‘the city in the process of thinking’ and where ‘a city is not only a sociological object, but also a machine that undoes and exceeds sociological definitions posing new problems for thinking The ‘Durban Moment’, 1970–1974 101 and thinkers, images and image-makers’.9 As it emerges in this chapter, Durban was an important site in South Africa and generated a burst of creative intellectual production from black and white intellectuals. It was this combination of a gifted group of people, together with small political spaces, which served as the foundation of what would become known as the ‘Durban Moment’.

The Durban city space With the powerful presence of the nearby, Durban was a historical centre of thinking about race relations. The secretary for native affairs of Natal, Sir Theophilus Shepstone (1817–1893), was a prominent advocate for early proto-segregationist legislation, which envisioned the creation of native reserves and manipulated traditional authority for colonial rule.10 Durban was also a model for other African cities of the so-called Durban system, whereby the city municipality controlled the brewing and sale of beer to the African working class, the revenue of which went into a native revenue account for native administration.11 This prominence in race thinking had taken a new turn by the 1970s, with Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s decision to participate in the KwaZulu Bantustan and the potential for the balkanisation of South Africa as an answer to the so-called native question. The prominent Afrikaans educationalist and social scientist E.G. Malherbe was principal of the Natal University College from 1945 until his retirement from the position in 1965. Although his appointment as principal to Natal was a political exile from Pretoria, where he had previously helped to found and head the National Bureau of Educational Research, Malherbe used the position in Durban to criticise apartheid and to defend the existence of the black Medical School.12 Professor Edgar Brookes was another prominent liberal at the university. He had been principal of Adams College in the 1940s and was a leading member of the Liberal Party in the 1960s. Natal had become more important for liberal politics after the Liberal Party moved its headquarters to the province. The change signalled that the centre of power had shifted from the Cape and older liberals such as Margaret Ballinger and Donald Molteno to the new leadership of Alan Paton, Peter Brown, ‘Selby Msimang, Leo Kuper, Manilal Gandhi, Jock Isacowitz, Pat Poovalingam’ and Brookes and the dominance 102 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS of ‘arguments for universal suffrage and political struggle outside Parliament’.13 As a historically colonial city, Durban subtly set limits to the rigorous extremes of the Group Areas Act, comparable to the case of Cape Town and the American South, where segregation made notably slower inroads into the residential segregation of more established cities like New Orleans, which ‘possessed pre-existing racial patterns that altered more slowly’.14 Durban also historically had fewer Afrikaans-speakers and thus the peculiar and complex identities of English-speaking South Africans, where feelings of social dislocation and cultural distance were particularly prominent, provided some critical perspective on South African society, more attuned to the burgeoning counter-culture explored in Chapter 2.15 Durban offered a space for interaction and dialogue, especially since parts of the city had proved more resistant to apartheid zoning than other cities in the country. The city was also home to South Africa’s largest population of Indians, including a substantial, educated middle class, functioning as an intermediary between whites and Africans. Durban was thus unique in its racial composition, with whites forming a relatively smaller part of the total population than in other South African cities and Indians filling white-collar positions where the possibility existed. 16 The Indian community in Durban provided a repository of what Anthony Marx refers to as the ‘lessons of struggle’.17 Histories of protest and community organisation in opposition to the white government stretched back, symbolically and organisationally, to the presence of Mahatma Gandhi and his establishment of the Phoenix Settlement in 1904. By the 1960s these layers of activists were community figures who helped to inspire a new generation of Indian activists. In addition, the Indian middle class was simultaneously growing economically stronger, but increasingly alienated by the government’s Group Areas Act and other racist legislation. Like other Bantu Education students, young Indians were increasingly angry and frustrated.18 At the University of Natal, sociologist Fatima Meer spoke out consistently against apartheid. An added element of the Durban Moment was the relaunching of the in June 1971 under Mewa Ramgobin, originally established by Gandhi in 1893. The relaunched organisation initially drew support from SASO members such as Strini Moodley and Saths Cooper, before relations later soured.19 The ‘Durban Moment’, 1970–1974 103

Durban was also a haven for South African hippies and a counter- culture movement, with runaway school pupils drawn by its reputation. The Furness Avenue area became a focus for alternative lifestyles and developed countrywide notoriety for its defiance of South African norms. The city drew a group of people who were attuned to the protest decade of the 1960s, listening to Bob Dylan and Frank Zappa, sensitive to currents of thought emerging from Europe and America.20 The Medical School at the University of Natal, in particular, offered a political space for the discussion of ideas. It offered the only facility for the training of black medical doctors in South Africa and at a ‘white’ English-speaking university. UNNE or the University of Natal Black Section (UNB), as it was later known, attracted a cohort of ambitious and articulate African students, many of whom had been through the politicising effects of Bantu Education at the ‘bush’ universities, or had been expelled during the 1968 and 1972 university strikes. The students were able to cast a critical eye back on both inherited patterns of thinking, as well as the propaganda of the state in their ‘homelands’.21 By 1970 Durban had become the de facto headquarters of SASO, with Biko’s room in the Alan Taylor Residence functioning for a time as the national office. In spite of this, the University of Natal Medical School, along with the University of Fort Hare, in fact proved to be most resistant to the new ‘go it alone’ approach advocated by SASO. The tradition of liberal non-racialism was entrenched particularly strongly among some of the black student leaders at both centres. Ben Ngubane was a notable leader at UNB who was extremely resistant to the new type of thinking. After being forced by the University of Natal to cease operating from the university, SASO set up an office at 86 Beatrice Street, in downtown Durban. Howard Trumbull, a missionary with the American Board Mission who served as treasurer for the Congregational Church of Southern Africa, rented the empty upstairs room in the church offices to SASO, which he was able to do as treasurer without permission from the church authorities. He had been involved with Paton and the Defence and Aid Fund in Natal since 1966.22 Although Biko denied there was any reason for locating the SASO headquarters in Durban, brushing the fact aside as ‘a historical aberration’, he acknowledged that Durban was not a typical South African city, zoned with a white central business district and the 104 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS outskirts for ‘non-whites’. In Durban, Biko acknowledged, ‘there is this whole meeting ground of this half of town. It is supposed to be an Indian area, and it is accessible therefore to all groups. There are no restrictions attached to Africans regarding Indian areas.’23 From this office, SASO published a regular newsletter, with the aim of introducing ideas and generating debate on black campuses. The newsletter was a central medium of communication. SASO’s attention to its national image and its investment in circulating reading material allowed critical observers to actively monitor the development of its discourse. Turner studied ‘the SASO newsletter, and . . . SASO associated publications like Creativity and Black Development, and Black Theology’.24 There was thus ready access given for those who wished to explore the movement. The aims of SASO’s newsletter were given as: establishing ‘proper contact amongst the various black campuses’ and the black community; stimulating debate on ‘current matters of topical interest’; foregrounding ‘black opinion on matters affecting blacks in South Africa’; making ‘known the stand taken by students in matters affecting their lives on and off campus’; examining ‘relevant philosophical approaches to South Africa’s problems’; and, centrally, contributing to ‘the formulation of a viable and strong feeling of self- reliance and consciousness amongst the black people of South Africa’.25 Although these aims were targeted at generating black solidarity, the SASO Newsletter also created a national profile that was accessible to both white and black observers. The newsletter provided a medium for the crystallisation and translation of the Black Consciousness message. As scholars Mbulelo Vizikhungo Mzamane and David R. Howarth observe: ‘Black Consciousness intellectuals made use of the SASO Newsletter, which was the major means of communicating the Black Consciousness message from 1970 until mid-1973.’ At its peak, they note that the SASO Newsletter appeared four or five times a year and its circulation reached 4 000 copies, not counting its hand-to-hand circulation.26 Lindy Wilson also notes that ‘SASO became a sub-culture of the university’. Malusi Mpumlwana emphasised how when he arrived at UNB it was the warmth and camaraderie of the SASO group that attracted him. They read widely outside of their curriculum and this intellectual searching ‘provided the essence of the debates, and The ‘Durban Moment’, 1970–1974 105 the discussions that made the future have some kind of meaningful possibility’.27 The intense dialogue, reading and distillation of ideas that occurred at the Alan Taylor Residence and further afield were crucial in redressing the floundering intellectual self-confidence in black students. Biko had noted after his tour of black campuses in 1971 that ‘most of the students, while very sure of what they did not like . . . lacked a depth of insight into what can be done. One found wherever he went the question being asked repeatedly “where do we go from here?” ’28 Biko considered the situation a ‘tragic result’ of ‘the old approach, where the blacks were made to fit into a pattern largely and often wholly, determined by white students’. As a result, ‘our originality and imagination have been dulled to the point where it takes a supreme effort to act logically even in order to follow one’s beliefs and convictions’. Seeking to redress this situation involved an active search for intellectual resources, as mentioned by Mosibudi Mangena, from thinkers from the African diaspora, such as Amílcar Cabral, Léopold Senghor and Frantz Fanon. In response to Gail Gerhart’s question as to the intellectual origins of the Black Consciousness Movement, Biko asserted that ‘it wasn’t a question of one thing out of a book and discovering that it’s interesting’. Rather it was ‘also an active search for that type of book, for the kind of thing that will say things to you, that was bound to evoke a response’.29 Having Biko in Durban was critical. Themba Sono, the former SASO president who left South Africa for studies in the United States (after falling foul of the SASO leadership at its third General Students’ Council in 1972 for advocating working with government institutions), judged the ‘pivotal’ factor in the development of Black Consciousness as the ‘overpowering mind of Biko’. More strongly, Sono foregrounds ‘the charismatic personality of Steve Biko, without whom any discussion of the early phase if not the entire spectrum of Black Consciousness becomes sterile and ineffectual’.30 As his compatriot and friend Barney Pityana recalled of ‘long hours of interaction and debate among friends’ at the Alan Taylor Residence, it was Biko who was the central participant: ‘He listened and challenged ideas as they emerged, concretised them, and brought them back for further development.’ Although the refining of ideas was a collaborative effort and the product of consensus, 106 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

it was Steve who translated that common idea into essays that went into his columns as , I Write What I Like, and as memoranda to the SRCs [student representative councils] and SASO Local Branches. It was Steve ultimately who concretised and articulated the ideas. He captured the common mind.31

It was this ability to formalise and systematise a mood and general consensus that made Biko’s role so central. Biko’s facility for communication was put to full use when at the July 1970 SASO student council meeting in Wentworth, Pityana replaced him as president and Biko was elected chair of SASO publications. As Mzamane and Howarth note, this was ‘a crucial post because the early to mid-1970s witnessed an outpouring of scholarship (on subjects like poetry, aesthetics, culture, politics, economics, and theology) within the movement’.32 Notable publications were the SASO Newsletter, Creativity and Black Development, Black Review and Black Viewpoint. Mamphela Ramphele remembers how Biko spent well over a year working on the first Black Review: ‘Single-handedly Steve designed the first edition . . . The data was derived from newspaper cuttings, visits to newspaper libraries, and Hansard reports on parliamentary proceedings.’ Together with editorial assistants Malusi Mpumlwana, Tomeka Mafole and Welile Nhlapo, Biko worked from ‘the second half of 1971 and the whole of 1972’.33 As a result of Biko’s banning, on completion and before the printing of the first Black Review in 1973, his name had to be omitted and Bennie Khoapa was instead named as editor. Biko also impacted on white students in Durban. As NUSAS activist Paula Ensor, who dated Biko for a time, recalls:

We found in Steve an energetic, articulate and tireless interlocutor: patient, kind, humorous and always razor sharp. He didn’t try to convert, but to challenge us with the imperatives of his political programme and oblige us to take a position of our own. The debates were always serious, but we also found time to drink, dance, listen to music, and for those who qualified, play rugby. Durban in the late 1960s and early 1970s was a hub of intense political debate and activity, The ‘Durban Moment’, 1970–1974 107

involving many brilliant young minds. Dominating that space with the dazzling power of his intellect and political courage was Steve Biko.34

Ensor’s recollections evoke relationships that transcended ‘politics’ to encompass human interactions in every sphere: intimate (the relationship between Biko and Ensor), recreational (‘we also found time to drink, dance, listen to music’), intellectual and political. Ensor also raises the gender politics that will be explored in the next chapter, referring to ‘those who qualified’ who played rugby, which was synonymous with men, presumably the one area of interaction in which women could not participate. Drawing on the work of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, Anne Mager describes how in South Africa both rugby and soccer became sites of ‘deep play’, ‘an arena where male behaviour was imagined, performed and celebrated’.35 There was thus definitely an element of male exclusivism that dogged even this most progressive of moments. Ramphele would later remember how Biko would dictate to her as she would write, a scene that was powerfully emblematic of the relationships between women and men in the Black Consciousness Movement.36 It is not inconsequential though that Biko and Ramphele shared a close relationship at this crucial stage of Biko’s activism and Ramphele’s description of herself as a scribe of Biko’s thought doubtless does an injustice to her role as an independent thinker and interloctutor for Biko. Like Biko, Turner was a migrant to Durban, newly appointed to his first permanent post of lecturer in the department of political science at the University of Natal on the Howard College campus in 1970. He came to the University of Natal as someone with a growing reputation for his incisive intellect and clarity of vision, qualities that were sorely needed in a moment where new strategies were required. Thomas Karis and Gail Gerhart attribute Turner’s significance to the particular historical circumstances of the 1968–1973 period, where ‘the rupture between NUSAS and SASO created a situation where the force of Turner’s personality and opinions intersected with the need among white student activists to find a new political identity and role’. As they note, Turner ‘was frequently invited to speak on white campuses and at NUSAS seminars, where his lucid analyses contributed both 108 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS to the legitimation of black consciousness ideas and to the spread of philosophical radicalism among white students’.37 Beyond being a lucid thinker, Turner was also a highly charismatic teacher. Dick Usher, a local journalist who lived in Turner’s back yard for a time, reflected that ‘he was superb with students, making them feel their ideas were important and being more concerned with helping them refine their thoughts than imposing his own’.38 Peter Sacks, a student of Turner’s who later moved to the United States, evocatively recalled Turner’s manner with students in a poem:

You sat among us on the floor translating Althusser, barefoot, jeans, a pale blue shirt, your black-rimmed lenses doubling the light, the red shock of your hair. At some slight turn of argument your freckled hands followed the actual phrasing in the air. ‘I know it’s difficult in this country, but we’ve got to think more clearly than the State allows.’39

As Sacks remembered, Turner had ‘sat among’ the students, a position that ran against the hierarchical structure of university life and implied solidarity and empathy with the students. His manner of dress, in a period where just a few years previously male students had worn suits and ties to university, reinforced his non-conformist stand. It is further telling that the central political and philosophical insight of Turner that Sacks recalls was that it was imperative ‘to think more clearly than the State allows’. This was perhaps Turner’s most abiding contribution. In his solidarity with students, his rejection of hierarchy and his charisma, Turner showed a strong resemblance to Biko’s leadership style, which was facilitative and empowering. As Wilson writes of Biko: ‘His presence ensured that people would be heard and their opinion considered. He engendered trust and freed people to use their potential.’40 Turner’s time in Durban, between 1970 and 1973 was his most influential.41 Omar Badsha, an Indian activist, artist and trade unionist, The ‘Durban Moment’, 1970–1974 109 recalls that both Biko and Turner were relatively unknown before coming to Durban and suggested to me that it was, in a sense, Durban that made both men.42 As Badsha recalled, they were

totally newcomers and I introduced . . . Rick to a lot of people, to all the networks that I knew because he was brilliant, very humble, very friendly, knew how to work with people. He didn’t have any of the hang-ups of most white liberals. He never treated people in a sort of patronising way.43

In addition to the networks that Badsha introduced Turner to, Turner’s permanent position as political science lecturer at the University of Natal provided him with an effective base. Turner ‘pioneered the teaching of radical political philosophy’ with Raphael de Kadt and Michael Nupen in the political science department, making it one of the most innovative in the country.44 In his teaching Turner employed a method of searching questions, modelled on a Socratic dialogue, which sought to undermine the rigid hierarchy that existed between lecturer and student and to open students to their hidden, uncritical assumptions.45 By the end of 1972 Turner had close contacts with the members of SASO, as well as members of the newly relaunched Natal Indian Congress, the Coloured Labour Party and Chief Buthelezi. According to his own later testimony, Turner was often consulted by members of these political parties on the nature of South African society.46 This was the high point of Turner’s influence, which was felt further afield through the impact of his writing, which stimulated new thinking in the country in ways that meshed with the search for new strategies of change. For example, Biko referred to an article of Turner’s in his paper to the student conference held at the Abe Bailey Institute in January 1971, where Turner argued it was likely that a future black government would be socialist.47 In addition to his prominent role in Durban, Peter Randall, director of the Study Project on Christianity in Apartheid Society (SPRO-CAS), invited Turner to join the Economics and Politics commissions, on which he served between 1971 and 1972. This involvement resulted in Turner’s only book, a provocative projection of a future South African society, The Eye of the Needle: 110 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

Towards Participatory Democracy in South Africa, commissioned under the auspices of the SPRO-CAS project and published in 1972. Lastly, but importantly, Turner doubtless owed much of his sensitivity to the political situation to his relationship with his second wife, Foszia Fisher, whom he met in 1970. Foszia recalled being introduced to Turner through Biko, getting to know him at a party held in Mamphela’s room after a panel discussion on racism that Turner had spoken at.48 In openly marrying Foszia, classified as Coloured by apartheid’s racial typologies, Turner had broken the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949), one of the first laws implemented by the National Party after its electoral victory in 1948. Foszia had studied philosophy at the University of Natal, and emerged as an important activist in her own right and no doubt would have helped to sensitise Turner to the palpable realities of life that blacks experienced under apartheid. One example was a disagreement between the couple, where Turner had maintained that the Holocaust was the most terrible episode in human history, to which Foszia had countered that apartheid and colonialism had to be reckoned on a similar scale, for their systematic denial to people of their humanity, culture and history.49 Through such conversations Foszia must have helped Rick to feel black experience.

Biko’s and Turner’s approaches to change Although Biko propagated the need for black self-reliance, as we have seen, he maintained his relationships with white student leaders. While he often seemed dismissive of liberals, he did see a role for them that played into his conception of South African society as dominated by a struggle between power blocs. As he observed: ‘We are oppressed not as individuals, not as Zulus, Xhosas, Vendas or Indians. We are oppressed because we are black. We must use that very concept to unite ourselves and to respond as a cohesive group.’50 In his analysis, the white community in South Africa acted as a single interest group – as he put it at the Abe Bailey conference, it was basically ‘a homogenous community’ that occupied ‘a privileged position that they do not deserve’. In this context, Biko saw liberals as playing a mitigating role in facilitating change, but this role would always, of necessity, be The ‘Durban Moment’, 1970–1974 111 supplementary to black leadership. Using a mechanical analogy, Biko argued liberals should act as ‘a lubricating material so that as we change gears in trying to find a better direction for South Africa, there should be no grinding noises of metal against metal but a free and easy flowing movement which will be characteristic of a well-looked- after vehicle’.51 He therefore did not sneer at ‘their involvement’ or hold them primarily responsible for ‘the black man’s plight’. It was rather a matter of structure constraining agency, or as Biko put it, ‘total identification with an oppressed group in a system that forces one group to enjoy privilege and to live on the sweat of another, is impossible’.52 The counter-culture created an anomaly for Biko. He described it as a ‘curious bunch of non-conformists who explain their participation in negative terms; that bunch of do-gooders that goes under all sorts of names – liberals, leftists, etc’.53 Biko counselled such people to cease their attempt to lead blacks and to instead confront the root of the problem in his analysis, which was white racism: ‘We recognise the existence of one major force in South Africa. This is White Racism.’54 While Biko emphasised white racism, he also argued that it had an economic root, which had become obscured and white racism had now become a problem in its own right. ‘There is no doubt that the colour question in South African politics was originally introduced for economic reasons,’ he observed. However, as a way of rationalising privilege, whites had come to ‘believe in the inferiority of the black man’.55 Thus, Biko argued that in South Africa there could never be such a thing as a white ‘worker in the classical sense’ that Marx and Engels had appealed to, as ‘even the most down-trodden white worker still has a lot to lose if the system is changed’.56 According to Biko, Black Consciousness sought to critique ‘class theory’ on the basis that workers would never unite across the colour line in the colonial context. Thus, an ‘analysis of our situation in terms of one’s colour at once takes care of the greatest single determinant for political action – i.e. colour – while also validly describing the blacks as the only real workers in South Africa’. To remedy this situation, Biko strategised the need to reverse the process, where blacks needed to recognise their inherent worth, find ways of ensuring economic independence and thus create the conditions for true integration on the basis of equality 112 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS of power. While Biko rejected the communist argument, he did recognise the need for a redistribution of wealth as a precondition for true integration, arguing that ‘any form of political freedom which does not touch on the proper distribution of wealth will be meaningless’.57 Anticipating some of the challenges of a post-apartheid society, Biko recognised that ‘a mere change of face of those in governing positions’ would have the effect that ‘black people will continue to be poor, and you will see a few blacks filtering through into the so-called bourgeoisie’ and South African ‘society will be run almost as of yesterday’. Biko was further aware of apartheid as a unitary economic system that exploited black labour. South Africa had been built on ‘their cheap labour . . . Our money from the townships takes a one-way journey to white shops and white banks, and all we do in our lives is pay the white man either with labour or in coin.’58 Apartheid was essentially an exploitative economic system. Furthermore, the whole Bantustan system was incorrigible and could not be used to any positive end, as many, including even Turner, argued at the time. Biko and other Black Consciousness activists referred to the apartheid state as ‘the system’, a formulation that emphasised its all-encompassing power to influence thought and constrain opposition. The only viable response to apartheid institutions was a complete rejection of their legitimacy. As Biko wrote in the SASO Newsletter in June 1971, ‘I completely discourage the movement of people from the left to join the institutions of apartheid . . . all of us who want to fight within the system are completely underestimating the influence the system has on us.’ Biko advised what he called ‘the left’ to test ‘the limits of possibility within the system, to prove the whole game a sham and to break off the system’ – as an example, calling on the Coloured Labour Party to pull out of the Coloured Representative Council.59 As a more effective method of organisation, Biko advocated community development as part of his appeal for the need for the black community to act as a power bloc and seek to build black people’s independence. Biko appealed to the Hegelian dialectic as a solution to the power of white racism. The philosopher M. John Lamola observes that Biko may have been exposed to Hegel’s approach to history through his fascination with the work of Jean-Paul Sartre.60 Biko explicitly referred to ‘the Hegelian theory of dialectic materialism’, by which The ‘Durban Moment’, 1970–1974 113 he understood history to proceed by a definite logic through distinct stages, interspersed with social revolutions characterised by tension between a thesis and an antithesis, out of which emerged a synthesis.61 For Biko, if the thesis was white racism, it followed that the antithesis, should ‘ipso facto, be a strong solidarity amongst the blacks on whom this white racism seeks to prey’.62 The problem with the liberal argument, for Biko, was that to counter white racism, they offered the antithesis of non-racialism, but did not give any indication of what the synthesis was. He took his critique further by arguing the liberal ‘antithesis is already a watered-down version of the truth’, masking a latent racism ‘whose close proximity to the thesis will nullify the purported balance’.63 Lamola critiques Biko for this definition of the antithesis as black solidarity, arguing that there is a logical flaw because Biko’s antithesis contradicts the desired synthesis of a non-racial future and ‘becomes an illogical dead end, a self-contradiction, a defeat of the purpose’, which Lamola sees as translating into a flawed political praxis.64 As we will see, Lamola’s critique evokes some of the tensions between Biko’s proposal for change and Turner’s. In The Eye of the Needle, it is possible to distil Turner’s basic political philosophy, though this was never static and the book was published relatively early, in 1972, and Turner’s thinking developed after this point. As part of the SPRO-CAS project, Turner was writing for a different audience to Biko and this became apparent in the form of the book, which sought to defend its most basic premises: that change to social institutions was possible and that an alternative society based on love was as feasible, if not more logical, than a capitalist system based on selfishness. Turner deflected the critique of such conceptions as utopian by arguing that utopian thinking was in fact vital to critique the present order. As he argued: ‘Unless we can see our society in the light of other possible societies we cannot even understand how and why it works as it does, let alone judge it.’65 On first comparison, it is evident that Biko and Turner agreed in their basic analysis of South African society. Steven Friedman has most recently made the point that Turner made an important contribution to thinking on race in South Africa, as much as his evident contribution to the understanding of class.66 Both Biko and Tuner viewed racism as a symptom of a capitalist social system, what Turner referred to as the 114 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

‘social structure’. According to Turner, both whites and blacks were victims in this structure, though ‘victims of a different kind’. Whites were ‘responsible victims, who exercise coercive power to keep the structure in existence’.67 In such a conception, race was a signifier for such thinking, but it could be others, such as caste in India, ‘or the superior virtues and intelligence of the middle-classes in nineteenth- century Europe’. For Turner, racism was but one symptom of a capitalist system that sanctioned exploitation; he argued that ‘race as a sign of superiority-inferiority’ was ‘of secondary importance to the concept of superiority-inferiority’, which he saw as reflective of a socialisation process that led individuals to think in such terms, to accept a social structure based on exploitation and the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few.68 Like Biko, Turner identified what he referred to as internal morality, which accepted the human model as it stood, but sought ‘to rationalise it, to smooth the edges’ by, for example, not stealing, paying debts and giving to the poor in an ameliorative way. A second and more fundamental ethic for Turner, however, was what he called transcendental morality, which challenged ‘the human model’ implicit in the system by asking ‘fundamental questions’ of that system.69 Turner saw such transcendental morality as a common point in all religions, which for him explained their social utility. Like the radical Catholics and Black Theology, Turner focused on the person of Jesus, particularly his freedom, ‘his ability to be open to other people and to react to them and their needs, not in terms of preconceived, stereotyped ideas and attitudes, but afresh in each new situation’.70 For Turner, Jesus was the model human who had transcended his own socialisation to act in complete freedom. In Turner’s view, the root of racism was a clash of material interests fostered by the prevailing social structure.71 As he observed, by the 1970s already, ‘equality of opportunity’ would not be sufficient to ensure ‘a just society’, with whites ‘so firmly entrenched that they probably don’t need any of the legal barriers to black advancement anyway’.72 Turner’s solution was to attack what he saw as the problem at its root. Unlike Biko’s appeal to the Hegelian dialectic, which called for black solidarity to counter white racism, Turner prescribed the need for a completely new human model, what he referred to as a Christian model based on The ‘Durban Moment’, 1970–1974 115 love. This model was to be fulfilled by what he called participatory democracy. It would be a social system that ensured the satisfaction of human needs by giving individuals maximum control over their lives and encouraging creative interaction between individuals. One component of this system would be new social institutions that would ‘give all individuals power over their own lives without permitting them to exercise power over other people’.73 The ‘first essential for democracy’ was to legalise trade unions to give workers ‘power at their place of work’.74 Such arrangements would also ensure that workers would become more aware of the greater issues facing their particular industry, thus serving to educate them. Turner saw participatory democracy as being the only viable solution to the problems of South Africa, which was an unequal society because whites had skilfully manipulated ‘power in their own interests . . . because they had internalized the capitalist human model’. Change would only be realised through ‘a fundamental redistribution of wealth and of power’.75 With the removal of conflict of interest between races, racism would be deprived of its power and education would then be able to address prejudice. Secondly, Turner advocated the creation of institutions that would overcome the problem of alienation and integrate individuals ‘into the decision-making process’.76 In addition, powers should be devolved to local authorities as much as possible to ‘help integrate the common and the particular interest’.77 It is evident how much Turner and Biko agreed in their assessment of South African society. Neither saw the differences between blacks and whites as irreconcilable, but both recognised that a new political and economic order was required to usher in a just society where race was not a divider. Both Biko and Turner were committed to the ‘quest for a true humanity’.78 Biko’s vision from his first article, under the pseudonym ‘Frank Talk’, asserted that at ‘the heart of true integration is the provision for each man, each group to rise and attain the envisioned self ’. This demanded that ‘each group must be able to attain its style of existence without encroaching on or being thwarted by another’. It would be out of ‘mutual respect for each other and complete freedom of self-determination’ that a ‘genuine fusion of the life-styles of the various groups’ could be achieved; this would be ‘true integration’.79 It was what Turner had seen was barred from the experience of white 116 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

South Africans, amid the trappings of material comfort; it was the ‘the excitement of self-discovery, the excitement of shattered certainties, the thrill of freedom’.80 Both saw that racism had become interpolated with capitalist exploitation. Whereas Biko called for a black solidarity to confront white racism, Turner focused on changing social institutions to give people power and to challenge the underlying model of human fulfilment. The establishment of trade unions was a critical component of his vision of a participatory democracy. Biko, somewhat uncritically, believed African culture to be inherently ‘man-centred’81 and so felt that the human model in an authentically African society would not have to be changed. He spoke of a ‘judicious blending’ of private and public ownership as the underlying principle of the future economic system.82 What was to become evident is that Biko’s and Turner’s methods towards attaining this new society differed.83 A number of contemporaries would later allude to the existence and vibrancy of the interaction between Biko and Turner. Foszia Turner- Stylianou recalled that Biko would visit their house and have long conversations with Turner.84 Ramphele remembers that Turner used to visit the Alan Taylor Residence and became friendly with all the students there. She remembers how Turner, perhaps raising similar limitations to those noted by Lamola, ‘spent long periods of time arguing with Steve about the analytical limitations of Black Consciousness, which a socialist perspective could remedy by adding a class analysis to address some of the complexities of power relations in South Africa’.85 Turner recognised the importance of Black Consciousness in addressing the psychological effects of apartheid on black people, but he pointed to its failure to spell out what new values a post-apartheid society would be based upon. Drawing on the comparison with négritude, Turner argued that the ‘stress on blackness helped to obscure . . . problems of post- independence society’ and ignored the class divisions that colonialism had introduced. He cited Julius Nyerere, who commented: ‘Many leaders of the independence struggle . . . were not against capitalism; they simply wanted its fruits, and saw independence as a means to that end.’86 According to Ramphele, ‘Steve in turn pointed out to Rick that an economic class analysis which ignored the racist nature of capitalist exploitation in South Africa, and in many other parts of the globe, was itself inadequate. White workers identified more with white owners of The ‘Durban Moment’, 1970–1974 117 capital than with black workers, Steve would conclude.’ Ramphele notes how the debate would ‘drift into a discussion of the false consciousness of white workers, ending with Steve challenging Rick to go out and conscientise white workers to prove that his approach would work in apartheid South Africa’.87 It may be that these discussions between Turner and Biko explain the dovetailing of their views on racism and exploitation, as can be seen in their published work. One difference was that Turner was an atheist whereas Biko admitted no difficulty in believing in an omnipotent being, noting, ‘I am sufficiently convinced of the inadequacy of man and the rest of creation to believe that a greater force than mortals is responsible for creation, maintenance and continuation of life.’88 Indeed, a sense of a religious calling was central to the way Biko understood and communicated his mission to others. The calling was rationalised by Biko through a particular understanding of its nature and implications. ‘Obedience to God in the sense that I have accepted it is in fact at the heart of the conviction of most selfless revolutionaries,’ he observed. ‘It is a call to men of conscience to offer themselves and sometimes their lives for the eradication of evil.’ However, Biko and Turner shared an interest in philosophy and the thought of Sartre surely provided a common point for discussion. Pityana remembers that Biko ‘laid his hands on some philosophical writings like Jean-Paul Sartre and made ready use of them’.89 Biko found Sartre’s work particularly stimulating in thinking through the concepts of freedom and responsibility.90 Sartre had been a formative influence on Turner and there is no evidence that he shifted from the Sartrean standpoint. Both men also shared a concern for the meaning of language. As Turner contended later, misunderstandings were almost always associated with confusions over the definitions of key terms, especially where parties had different understandings of the terms of the debate.91 Biko was similarly careful about the need to be clear about key definitions, concluding his paper to a leadership school at the end of 1971 by stressing ‘again the need for us to know very clearly what we mean by certain terms and what our understanding is when we talk of Black Consciousness’.92 In the spirit of exactness over meaning, Turner was explicit about the need for Black Consciousness activists to see different ‘categories’ of white South Africans, namely 118 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

‘racist, liberal and radical’. He suggested that the analysis of SASO was ‘confused by a very loose grasp of the concept “liberal” ’ and argued that there were black as well as white racists, as well as black and white radicals. Black Consciousness was ‘a form of radicalism’ and Turner emphasised that, rather than demonising white liberals, the aim should be the creation of a new culture.93 The sociologist Eddie Webster portrayed the relationship in similar terms to Ramphele. Webster arrived in Durban in February 1973 from his studies at York in the United Kingdom to take up a position at the department of sociology at the University of Natal and made immediate contact with Turner.94 In Webster’s view, Turner emphasised that it ‘was not race’ that ‘explains the exploitation of the black worker, but the capitalist system’. ‘Do not let your Blackness blind yourself to the fact that your power lies in the unorganized working class.’95 Biko’s response to this position was best characterised in his ‘Frank Talk’ article ‘Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity’ where he argued: ‘Let them go to van Tonder in the Free State and tell him [that the situation is a class struggle rather than a racial one]’, implying that the visceral racist response one would receive would be enough to convince one that racism was a problem in its own right.96 As we have seen, the contention was not in fact about the nature of South African society, on which Turner and Biko reached something of a common view. It was rather a question of leadership of the struggle and how change would come about. What was irksome for Biko was the way in which whites had taken class analysis as another avenue through which to take leadership and assume a superior position vis- à-vis blacks. At his most cynical, for Biko, class analysis was adopted as a ‘defence mechanism’ by whites that deflected criticism of their position in South Africa’s racial hierarchy, a view of society and history that was therefore ‘more comfortable’. To make matters worse, they had become dogmatic and arrogant in their assertions. Biko’s critique of the ‘white left’ went so far as to argue for a white ‘liberal-left axis’, which, while recognising that the rights of black people were being violated and that blacks needed to be ‘brought up’, failed to see that this necessarily entailed some of them ‘coming down’. ‘This was the The ‘Durban Moment’, 1970–1974 119 problem,’ Biko reflected, ‘we talk about that, and we get a whole lot of reaction and self-preservation mechanisms from them.’97 Turner did not completely escape such traps. He was surely the target of a SASO editorial in August 1971, where he was identified as a ‘prominent Doctor of Philosophy and lecturer at the University of Natal’. The editor took particular umbrage at Turner presenting a paper on Black Power in South Africa to students at the Alan Taylor Residence. For the editor, this was ‘a typical example of how the paternalistic “liberal” is intent on infiltrating the ranks of the Black assertionist [sic]’. The editor took aim at the same target identified by Biko, class analysis, by arguing that ‘the Black youth is fed up with his over bearing paternalism, his sick condescension, his selfish concern “to find himself through contact with the Black man”, his attempts to turn the race struggle into a class struggle and dissect the “problems” of the Blackman’,98 a comment surely aimed at Turner as well as the generic ‘liberal’. Turner caused further offence when Ramphele later blamed him for wrecking the work of SASO at the New Farm Settlement Project, which is worth recounting here in some detail. Malusi Mpumlwana, chairperson of the University of Natal SASO committee, had been in charge of the project, working with the squatters at New Farm near the Phoenix Settlement, to improve their housing and provide them with running water. The emphasis had been on encouraging dialogue and initiative with the squatters at New Farm. As Ramphele reflects, the black students felt they had achieved a breakthrough when they were able to get each household to agree to contribute R2 to the provision of clean tap water. SASO agreed to cover the deficit. But, ‘matters went awry when a group of mainly young white activists, under the leadership of Richard Turner’ arrived.99 The white activists were prepared to pay for the costs of installing the tap water in total, thus negating the spirit of self-help that the SASO activists had worked hard to create. In Ramphele’s judgement, it was ‘as though the poverty of the New Farm residents offered a scarce resource, accessible to Natal University activists, for which they competed to test their ideals of community development’.100 The damage done by the insensitive course of action confirmed Black Consciousness ‘fears of white domination’. It was 120 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS more distressing because ‘Turner had up to that point been regarded by Black Consciousness activists as one of the few white radicals who understood their views about white racism and economic domination’. Ramphele was even more scathing in her autobiography, calling Turner’s interference at New Farm ‘the height of insensitivity’, commenting that ‘if ever there was a case of Black Consciousness needing to stand up to white people, one couldn’t have written a better script than this one’.101 Part of the refining of Black Consciousness was learning to work with and make use of the resources offered by white activists, but not to be used by them in turn.102 According to Ramphele, Biko needed to mediate between Turner and the angry SASO activists, who saw his interference at New Farm as an overt sign of white arrogance. There was also wider resistance to Turner’s ideas because of his position as a white intellectual. In Black Review 1973 the editor and celebrated ‘Soweto poet’ Mafika Pascal Gwala noted that the The Eye of the Needle had stimulated ‘much thinking in the Black youth [and] reaction to it was varied and controversial’.103 Gwala, who had been enrolled as a student at the University of Zululand, but had given up his studies to pursue political activism with SASO and was part of a group of budding black writers, writing in a black literary magazine based in Johannesburg called The Classic,104 contrasted Turner’s contribution with the publication, the following year, of Being-Black- in-the-World by the clinical psychologist Chabani Manganyi and also published under the auspices of SPRO-CAS and Ravan Press. Gwala argued that Manganyi’s publication, which among other things drew attention to the psychological damage in black people caused by apartheid, ‘showed further impetus in the Blacks wanting more to argue their case dialectically and therefore from an objective and more basic stand-point’. Things had changed and now the ‘system of reference’ was no longer ‘based on white terms of reference but on Black terms’.105 Gwala’s reservations with regard to Turner reflected his preoccupation with a search for ‘Black terms’ and an aversion to ‘white’ standards. Although he conceded that blacks saw the need for the fundamental socio-economic change envisaged in The Eye of The ‘Durban Moment’, 1970–1974 121 the Needle, Black Consciousness leaders qualified the book’s remit by arguing that ‘the only people who had a genuine interest and commitment to this objective were the victims of the system’. Gwala indicated that, although Turner’s book pointed in the right direction, its utopian solution occluded ‘the true perspective of the developments in the country which could be misleading to the average Black in the face of historic, social, economic and political reality in South Africa’. The danger was to fall back on the utopian analysis presented by Turner, without adequately grasping the structurally constrained position from which he was arguing. Thus the ‘criticism from Black Consciousness circles was that Blacks were by now quite aware that [a] radical stance was one thing and radical action quite another thing. Only Blacks could move into solidified action, not the whites – by virtue of their privileged position.’106 Such an argument bordered on an ad hominem fallacy, but spoke to the constraints of structure and whites’ problematic positions, even of self-confessed radicals such as Turner. Gwala’s reservations were informed by the understanding that whites could never be fully trusted as equally committed partners in the fight against apartheid. Thus, as a white man, Turner’s objectivity could not be taken for granted. He was arguing from a privileged position within the racial hierarchy set up by apartheid. Such thinking was perhaps also informed by the contribution of black American thought. SASO had specifically invited Robert C. Williams, a lecturer in religion at Vassar College in New York (not to be confused with Robert F. Williams, one of the American South’s ‘most dynamic race rebels’), to give the keynote address to SASO’s third General Student’s Council, held at the Catholic St Peter’s Seminary at Hammanskraal from 2 to 9 July 1972, but he could not attend.107 His paper, though, was printed along with the conference materials. Williams argued:

Contrary to what many European philosophers have taught, special group interests have played and will always play a major role in the formulation of philosophies and systems of value . . . [T]he big lie of the modern Western tradition is that there is such a thing as objectivity and a ‘value free’ inquiry.108 122 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

Turner’s book therefore needed to be treated warily because of the possibility that it could confuse blacks about the true nature of the struggle.

The wages commissions and the Durban Strikes As part of NUSAS’s outwards movement, students set up wages commissions in Durban in March 1971, which later spread to all the English-speaking campuses by July, under the aegis of NUSWEL, the social welfare arm of NUSAS, whose congress supported the motion put forward by Jeanette Curtis and Paula Ensor.109 Very firmly in the ‘students in society’ tradition that Martin Legassick identified, and following the injunction of black students to focus on their own communities, white students from the university canvassed the local white population in Durban and assisted in the setting up and the use of the poverty datum line, a calculation of the bare minimum costs of a standard household, originally pioneered by Edward Batson at the University of Cape Town in the 1930s.110 The historian Grace Davie shows that the use of this statistical measurement enabled students to challenge white South African society with regard to the exploitative labour policies of Durban companies, as well as to gather evidence to help politicise Durban’s black workers, specifically the dockworkers at Durban harbour. Turner played an important role in conceptualising a model of worker’s control that was to provide focus to these efforts, as historian Alex Lichtenstein argues.111 Among those involved in the wages commissions were Halton Cheadle, David Davis, Karel Tip, Jeanette Curtis, Omar Badsha and Charles Nupen, with David Hemson acting as ‘the initial founder and key strategist for the group’.112 The wages commissions provided employment for NUSAS activists, who after completing their studies were unwilling to join formal employment and thus become part of the ‘social structure’ Turner had critiqued. In retrospect, the wages commissions also enabled a new cohort of students to link up with a much older network of trade unionists and grassroots intellectuals,113 who schooled them in strategy and the appropriate language to address workers.114 The Catholic Church also played a role in breathing new life into the trade unions through their Urban Training Project, designed to provide education for workers.115 It was supported by the Young Christian Workers (YCW), an internationally aligned organisation The ‘Durban Moment’, 1970–1974 123 that promoted democratic participation in trade unions, through ‘a profoundly progressive and innovative methodology that was easy for workers to assimilate and relate to their lived experiences under capitalism and apartheid’.116 The YCW founder, Belgian Reverend Joseph Cardijn, advocated a worker-centred organisation to promote worker leadership. The approach placed value on the individual workers’ experience, drawing on the ‘see, judge, act’ approach, which involved workers reflecting on their experience.117 Together with the ex-Trade Union Council of South Africa unionists Eric Tyacke and Loet Douwes-Dekker, the YCW launched the Urban Training Project in 1971. This institutional nexus allowed older unionists to play an important facilitating role for the new generation. Harriet Bolton, the general secretary of the Natal Garment Workers’ Union, whom Turner introduced the students to, provided access to her union’s facilities and co-operated with the Durban Wages Commission to publicise the findings of the poverty datum line research, which called for a minimum wage for unskilled work of R8.50 for men and R6.80 for women in mid-1972.118 Using a mimeograph machine from the university, the wages commission activists published a pamphlet, printing 15 000 copies, which called workers’ attention to the fact that they were living below the minimum wages and called on workers ‘to make your voice heard NOW’.119 This pamphlet called on workers to attend a meeting at Bolton Hall, which led to a meeting of 400 people. Although the outcome of the meeting was not conclusive, soon after there was an impromptu work stoppage at a Durban foundry, where workers were seen holding copies of the pamphlet.120 The work stoppage by Durban foundry workers reflected a wider mood of dissatisfaction among black workers. Already in September 1971, stevedores (or dockworkers) in Durban had threatened to strike if they were not given a pay rise.121 Cheadle and the Durban Wages Commission had jumped to defend the plight of the stevedores, publicising their low pay to the Daily News. In December 1971, around 5 000 Ovambo migrant workers had conducted an effective strike.122 In July 1972, 200 stevedores attended a Wage Board meeting in Durban at the Department of Labour at the encouragement of Hemson and other Wages Commission members. At the meeting Hemson presented 124 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS the poverty datum line research as the basis for the demand for a pay increase for the stevedores. The meeting became a confrontation with the stevedoring company’s induna, J.B. Buthelezi, whom Davie notes was the uncle of the leader of the KwaZulu homeland, Mangosuthu Buthelezi.123 The meeting resulted in a concession by the management that the wages paid to the stevedores were inadequate, but there was no commitment to increase pay. In Cape Town, the Wages Commission also called on stevedores to demand pay equal to the poverty datum line. When new wages were announced in Durban, they were set considerably lower than what had been demanded and 2 000 Durban stevedores went on strike, to which the company management responded by retrenching twenty workers. As Davie notes, ‘all these developments, plus the Ovambo strikes, contributed to the 1973 Durban Strikes’.124 At the time, however, they were completely unexpected, shocking white South Africa out of their complacency, even described by Morphet as ‘unpredicted, unexpected and revelatory’.125 The strikes began early on 9 January when 2 000 workers from the Coronation Brick and Tile factory assembled to march to a nearby football stadium to demand a minimum pay increase from R8.97 to R20 a week, which was later raised to R30. The workers returned to work after two days, with the intervention of Paramount Chief of Zululand Goodwill Zwelithini, and agreed to a R2 increase to R11.50 a week. The strikes, however, spread through the city and its major industrial centres of Pinetown and New Germany and Jacobs/ Mobeni.126 Over the course of the first three months of 1973, 61 000 workers went on strike, an estimated one-third of Durban’s total African workforce, directly affecting 100 companies. This figure compared to a total of only 23 000 workers who had gone on strike between 1965 and 1971 nationally.127 The immediate material gains of the striking workers were relatively small, with employers only agreeing to small pay increases. What the strikes achieved was to lay the ‘groundwork . . . for the development of a union movement’ that prioritised the interests of the workers, and signalled ‘that workers were winning new control over their lives’.128 Although, as the historian Julian Brown shows, the government depoliticised the strikes by focusing on their economic grievances, the Durban Strikes indicated a new type of independence, where workers The ‘Durban Moment’, 1970–1974 125 wrested control to enable greater freedom to unionise, which ‘helped set the framework for labour relations in subsequent years’.129 The activities of the wages commissions coincided with this new upsurge of black worker militancy, but cannot be said to have caused them. Davie cites workers’ analysis of the activities of the students in the wages commissions as resulting from guilt: ‘These students know their fathers are doing something wrong.’130 Looking back later, however, Eddie Webster drew on the idea of ‘knowledge creep’, propounded by Harvard academic Carol Weiss, to emphasise how ‘concepts percolate into the movement and come to shape the way people think about social issues’.131 Although Webster applied this concept to a much wider range of actors, it fruitfully captures the role of the wages commissions in popularising the importance of a living wage and it seems to me to best represent their role. Immediately after the Durban Strikes in 1973, Turner and a number of other prominent activists founded the Institute for Industrial Education (IIE) at the University of Natal.132 From 1972 Turner had already initiated a programme of ‘action research’, whereby groups of students would visit factories to collect research information from the workers on pay and working conditions in the greater Durban area.133 The IIE pooled the older trade unionists like Harriet Bolton with so-called freelance intellectuals based at the university or in wages commissions like Lawrence Schlemmer, John Copelyn, Alec Erwin, Foszia Fisher, Omar Badsha, Halton Cheadle, David Hemson, and Bhekisisa Nxasana, whom Eddie Webster identifies as ‘a union-made intellectual’.134 In a controversial move, calculated to provide the IIE with maximum protection, the homeland leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi was asked to act as chancellor.135 The first project, though, was to make sense of the Durban Strikes and the IIE published the first study of the strikes together with Ravan Press in 1974, The Durban Strikes: ‘Human Beings with Souls’, which gave comprehensive coverage of the actors in the strikes, as well as placing the strikes in historical perspective. The IIE also launched the South African Labour Bulletin. The focus of the early editions was to educate workers on the history of trade union activities in South Africa.136 In support of the Durban Strikes of early 1973, NUSAS launched a campaign to bring the labour crisis and the existing economic 126 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS inequalities that had prompted them ‘out into open debate’. NUSAS circulated discussion papers on issues from migrant labour and prison farms to black trade unions. In a statement, the NUSAS executive and four Student Representative Council presidents expressed their enlarged sense of responsibility. White students enjoyed ‘a most privileged position in South African society, which brings great responsibilities’. They pledged ‘to fulfil these responsibilities to South Africa as a whole – including the oppressed majority’.137 The strikes and the labour unrest seemed to vindicate white radicals’ emphasis on class and a renewed focus on workers’ struggles. SASO was somewhat sidelined in these developments, since its focus had been on black students and communities, rather than on workers, although, at its third General Students’ Council at Hammanskraal in July 1972, SASO delegates passed a motion to set up a black worker’s project to ‘establish a national trade union council for blacks’. However, this was ultimately ineffective.138 The Black People’s Convention also launched an independent trade union, the Black Allied Workers’ Union, under Drake Koka, but, as Karis and Gerhart argue, it ‘contributed little politically and under Koka’s independent leadership it stood aloof from the separate efforts of Black Community Programmes and SASO to create a Black Worker’s Council’.139 SASO and the Black People’s Convention were caught somewhat unawares by the strikes and could only respond by issuing two pamphlets, the first of which praised workers for their stand, while the second called on Indian and Coloured workers to stand with their African brothers as black workers. Saths Cooper, at this stage the public relations officer for the Black People’s Convention, and four others were arrested for distributing the pamphlets. The March 1973 edition of the SASO Newsletter was conspicuously quiet on the Durban Strikes, remarkably making no mention of them. Instead, the main focus of the newsletter was outrage over the banning of eight of its members: Steve Biko, Barney Pityana, Ranwedzi Nengwekhulu, Strini Moodley, Bokwe Mafuna, Saths Cooper, Drake Koka and Jerry Modisane. Bypassing the normal channels of litigation, Minister of Justice P.C. Pelser had argued that the SASO leaders had been banned to prevent giving them a ‘platform’ in a court of law,140 a prescient remark that would be confirmed when nine SASO activists would later be tried in court, which they did use effectively as a platform. The ‘Durban Moment’, 1970–1974 127

In response to the broad range of organisations examined here, the government had felt forced to act. Set up in 1972, the Schlebusch Commission had been investigating a number of organisations deemed suspect. The form of the commission, a secret government task team without any public accountability, had caused immediate opposition. Turner drafted a memorandum to the commission in his personal capacity as a citizen, in which he expressed confusion over the charges under which organisations such as NUSAS were being investigated. If NUSAS was under suspicion for ‘clandestine subversive activities’, it was a police and not a parliamentary matter. But because Prime Minister B.J. Vorster had appointed a parliamentary committee, Turner concluded that NUSAS was being investigated for its public activities. These charges Turner alleged, in an admittedly patronising didactic way, were mistaken because of the government’s ‘misunderstanding’ of the ‘nature of the university’, ‘the nature of democracy’ and ‘the central values of Western civilisation’, and thus the nature of the public activities of NUSAS.141 Turner’s considered submission to the commission unsurprisingly fell on deaf ears. Turner was also banned in February 1973, together with NUSAS leaders Neville Curtis, Paul Pretorius, Paula Ensor, Philippe le Roux, Sheila Lapinsky, Clive Keegan and Chris Wood,142 as well as the SASO eight. The impact of the bannings was immediately felt. Biko was sent to his ‘homeland’, confined to the magisterial district of King William’s Town, which thus marked the end of his direct involvement in Durban. Turner was banned to his home in Dalton Avenue, in the suburb of Bellair, a former Indian neighbourhood that had been rezoned under the Group Areas Act and allocated to white railway workers and civil servants.143 The bannings were intended to silence activists and place them in a form of internal exile at no cost to the state. They could not write for publication or address groups. Turner’s article ‘The Relevance of Contemporary Radical Thought’ could not be included in the final SPRO-CAS political commission report, South Africa’s Political Alternatives (1973). In spite of these restrictions, activists found ways around their bannings. Activists such as Communist Party member and defence lawyer Phyllis Naidoo continued to visit Turner and his wife, Foszia, at their home. Turner also used his banning to good effect and came full circle to return to philosophical study, extending the 128 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS insights of his doctoral thesis and studying canonical Western thinkers. Peter Hudson recalls Turner’s critique at this time of the structuralism of Louis Althusser that had become influential in the South African left.144 Furthermore, Turner studied Portuguese so that he could follow the process of decolonisation in Angola and Mozambique, as well as German, so as to study the philosophy of Hegel, Kant, Marx and Adorno more effectively.145 The government bannings also significantly curtailed the activities of NUSAS. In June 1973 the government outlawed all outdoor gatherings in the centre of Cape Town, an action that, together with restrictions on its national leadership, placed NUSAS on the back foot until the outbreak of the student uprisings in Soweto.146 The state’s clampdown on NUSAS, however, evoked wider support. Alluding to the vibrancy of the networks explored in Chapter 2, at a meeting convened in Pietermaritzburg in early March 1973, the president of the National Catholic Federation of Students (NCFS), Tim Dunne, condemned the actions of the government and deliberately quoted from banned NUSAS student leader Philippe le Roux, in the proscribed magazine, Dissent. In a press statement, the NCFS backed the decision of its president and defended his credentials. The statement presented a religious interpretation for his stand, arguing that Christianity implied ‘a rejection of injustice’ and called on followers to ‘follow the dictates of Christian conscience’ over and above the demands of the state.147

Conclusions The state’s crackdowns greatly reduced the activities of SASO and NUSAS in Durban. The impetus thereafter shifted to the trade unions, which were impelled into new life after the Durban Strikes of 1973. Although they found ways to circumvent their bannings, both Biko and Turner were limited by the government and remained out of the public eye until they were both summoned more than three years later, in 1976, to testify publicly at the SASO trial, which is discussed in the final chapter of this book. The Durban Moment had occurred in a unique context where activists drew on traditions of democratic thought, often making use of notions of transcendent values, in light of which political vision and political praxis could be examined.148 In the case of Biko and the Black Consciousness activists, this entailed, The ‘Durban Moment’, 1970–1974 129 on the one hand, a reinterpretation of African nationalist traditions, black American thought and the postcolonial critique of the ‘Third World’. In the instance of white students, congregated around Turner, it took the shape of a New Left critique of capitalist society and tapped into the spaces of South Africa’s dialectical tradition. This moment of re-evaluation and exploration, unlike the later Eastern Cape ‘moment’ of Woods and Biko, extended beyond Durban to influence thinking in SPRO-CAS, as well as providing an impetus for greater contextual theological re-evaluation, in the form of Black Theology centres. The Black Consciousness ‘othering’ of white liberals played a role in refining their political discourse, but it also created a space for meaningful engagement with those who were willing to go beyond the liberal paradigm. Turner, a young white South African who had left the country to study abroad, departed a liberal but returned changed, with a broader political consciousness, a move that was concretised and formalised by his contacts with Biko and the SASO students in Durban.

Notes 1. Tony Morphet gives this date for Biko and Turner’s meeting as it was when Turner moved to Durban. See T. Morphet, ‘Richard Turner: A Biographical Introduction’, in R. Turner, The Eye of the Needle: Towards Participatory Democracy in South Africa (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1980), xix. Helen Lunn suggested to me that Turner and Biko could well have met each other earlier, after Turner’s return to South Africa in 1966, given their close involvement in NUSAS between 1967 and 1970 (Johannesburg, 20 April 2010). 2. A. Stubbs, ‘Martyr of Hope: A Personal Memoir by Aelred Stubbs, CR’, in S. Biko, I Write What I Like: A Selection of His Writings (London: Penguin, 1978), 177. 3. Vanessa Noble observes that UNNE was the Medical School’s first official designation after being opened in 1951. During the early 1970s Black students pressured the university to drop the designation ‘Non-European’ in favour of ‘Black’. The university responded by changing the name to the University of Natal Medical School or University of Natal Faculty of Medicine in official designation, though the Medical School Student Representative Council began to refer to the medical school as University 130 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

of Natal Black Section (UNB). The Medical School was also referred to as ‘Wentworth Medical School’ by those students whose residences were located in Wentworth, near the university. See V. Noble, ‘Doctors Divided: Gender, Race and Class Anomalies in the Production of Black Medical Doctors in Apartheid South Africa, 1948 to 1994’, Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2005, 6. 4. Morphet’s lecture was later published as ‘Brushing History against the Grain: Oppositional Discourse in South Africa’, Theoria 76 (October 1990): 88–99. 5. Morphet, ‘Brushing History’: 92–3. 6. S. Friedman, ‘From Classroom to Class Struggle: Radical Academics and the Rebirth of Trade Unionism in the 1970s’, Journal of Asian and African Studies 49, no. 5 (2014): 526–43; H. Lunn, ‘From Sartre to Stevedores: The Connections between the Paris Barricades and the Re-emergence of Black Trade Unions in South Africa’, in Sixties Radicalism and Social Movement Activism: Retreat or Resurgence?, ed. B. Jones and M. O’Donnell (London: Anthem Press, 2012), 59–72. 7. The impact of Black Consciousness in precipitating the dominance of class theory is argued for strongly by Nurina Ally and Shireen Ally in ‘Critical Intellectualism: The Role of Black Consciousness in Reconfiguring the Race-Class Problematic in South Africa’, in Biko Lives! Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko, ed. A. Mngxitama, A. Alexander and N.C. Gibson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 171–88; the argument is made in respect of radical sociology in S. Ally, ‘Oppositional Intellectualism as Reflection, Not Rejection, of Power: Wits Sociology, 1975–1989’, Transformation 59 (2005): 66–97. 8. D. Massey, For Space (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2005), 9. 9. Cited in Massey, For Space, 159. 10. D. Welsh, The Roots of Segregation: Native Policy in Natal (1845–1910) (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1973). 11. E.J. Popke, ‘Managing Colonial Alterity: Narratives of Race, Space and Labor in Durban, 1870–1920’, Journal of Historical Geography 29, no. 2 (2003): 248–67. 12. S. Dubow, ‘Scientism, Social Research and the Limits of South Africanism: The Case of E.G. Malherbe’, South African Historical Journal 44, no. 1 (2001): 139. 13. R. Vigne, Liberals against Apartheid: A History of the Liberal Party of South Africa, 1953–68 (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 32–3. 14. J.W. Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South African and the American South (Cambridge 1982), 134; V. Bickford-Smith, The ‘Durban Moment’, 1970–1974 131

‘South African Urban History, Racial Segregation and the Unique Case of Cape Town?’, Journal of Southern African Studies 21, no. 1 (1995): 63–78. 15. For more see H. Lunn, ‘ “Hippies, Radicals and the Sounds of Silence”: Cultural Dialectics at Two South African Universities, 1966–1976’, Ph.D. diss., University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2009. 16. L. Kuper, H. Watts and R. Davies, Durban: A Study in Racial Ecology (London: Jonathan Cape, 1958), 50–55. See also B. Freund, Insiders and Outsiders: The Indian Working Class of Durban 1910–1990 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann 1995). Other important studies are B. Freund and V. Padayachee, eds, (D) urban Vortex: South African City in Transition (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2002) and P. Maylam and I. Edwards, eds, The People’s City: African Life in Twentieth-Century Durban (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press; Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1996). 17. A.W. Marx, Lessons of Struggle: South African Internal Opposition, 1960–1990. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. 18. Bobby Marie, interview, Johannesburg, 15 February 2013; Saths Cooper, interview, Johannesburg, 21 January 2014; Omar Badsha, interview, Cape Town, 1 February 2014. 19. G. Vahed and A. Desai, ‘A Case of “Strategic Ethnicity”? The Natal Indian Congress in the 1970s’, African Historical Review 46, no. 1 (2014): 22–47. Vahed and Desai note that both Biko and Turner were at the meeting on 25 June 1971 at Bolton Hall in Durban that called for the revival of the Natal Indian Congress (27–8). 20. Gerhard Maré, interview, Durban, 13 August 2008. 21. S. Buthelezi, ‘The Black Conciousness Movement in South Africa in the Late 1960s’, CEAPA Journal 1, no. 2 (1987): 24. 22. Howard Trumbull, Skype interview, 4 June 2010; David Trumbull, Skype interview, 2 June 2010. 23. G.M. Gerhart, ‘Interview with Steve Biko’, in Biko Lives! Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko, ed. A. Mngxitama, A. Alexander and N.C. Gibson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 36. 24. Supreme Court of South Africa (Transvaal Provincial Division), The State versus S. Cooper and Eight Others, Case No. 18/75/254 (Pretoria: Lubbe Recordings), 3005, Richard Turner Papers, E.G. Malherbe Library, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban. 25. SASO Newsletter, 1, no. 1 (May 1971): 21. http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/samay71. 26. M.V. Mzamane and D.R. Howarth, ‘Representing Blackness: Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement’, in South Africa’s Resistance Press: Alternative Voices in the Last Generation under Apartheid, ed. L. Switzer and M. Adhikari (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2000), 187. 132 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

27. L. Wilson, ‘Bantu Stephen Biko: A Life’, in Bounds of Possibility: The Legacy of Steve Biko and Black Consciousness, ed. B. Pityana, M. Ramphele, M. Mpumlwana and L. Wilson (Cape Town: David Philip, 1991), 28. 28. S. Biko, I Write What I Like (Johannesburg: Picador Africa, 2004), 19. 29. Gerhart, ‘Interview with Steve Biko’, 24. 30. T. Sono, Reflections on the Origins of Black Consciousness in South Africa (Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council, 1993), 2, 11. 31. B. Pityana, ‘Reflections on 30 Years since the Death of Steve Biko: A Legacy Revisited’, National Arts Festival Winter School lecture, 3 July 2007. http://uir. unisa.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10500/110/Steve%20Biko%20Lecture%20 2007%20doc%20final%20_2_.pdf;jsessionid=0B992F0570A5EAA29225 DDA0CE7F54B9?sequence=1. 32. Mzamane and Howarth, ‘Representing Blackness’, 182. 33. M. Ramphele, Across Boundaries: The Journey of a South African Woman Leader (New York: The Feminist Press, 1996), 67–8. 34. Cited in X. Mangcu, Biko: A Biography (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2012), 142–3. 35. A. Mager, Beer, Sociability, and Masculinity in South Africa (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2010), 7–8. 36. Wilson, ‘Bantu Stephen Biko’, 39. My thanks to Catherine Burns for alerting me to the significance of this dynamic of the relationship. 37. T.G. Karis and G.M. Gerhart, eds, From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa 1882–1990, Volume 5: Nadir and Resurgence, 1964–1979 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 70–1. 38. D. Usher, ‘Rick Turner: Prophet of the Moral Society’, Weekly Mail, 22–28 January 1988, 15. 39. Cited in Morphet, ‘Brushing History’, 90. 40. Wilson, ‘Bantu Stephen Biko’, 27. 41. Usher, ‘Prophet of the Moral Society’. 42. Badsha, interview. 43. Badsha, interview. 44. Usher, ‘Prophet of the Moral Society’. 45. D. Greaves, ‘Turner: Moral Visionary’, Natal Witness, 18 May 1993, Richard Turner Papers, E.G. Malherbe Library, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban. 46. Turner also gave advice over trade union disputes and information for Phyllis Naidoo to escape to Lesotho in July 1977. Phyllis Naidoo, interview, Durban, 29 April 2010. 47. Biko, I Write, 68. 48. Foszia Turner-Stylianou, interview, Johannesburg, 22 November 2014. 49. B. Keniston, Choosing to be Free: The Life Story of Rick Turner (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2013). The ‘Durban Moment’, 1970–1974 133

50. Biko, I Write, 107–8. 51. Biko, I Write, 28. 52. Biko, I Write, 71. 53. Biko, I Write, 69. 54. Biko, I Write, 54. 55. Biko, I Write, 96–7. 56. Biko, I Write, 54. 57. Biko, I Write, 169. 58. Biko, I Write, 107. 59. Biko, I Write, 41–2. 60. M.J. Lamola, ‘Biko, Hegel and the End of Black Consciousness: A Historico- Philosophical Discourse on South African Racism’, Journal of Southern African Studies 42, no. 2 (2016): 184. Lamola cites Mabogo More’s essay, ‘Sartre and South Africa’, in Race after Sartre, ed. J. Judaken (Albany: University of New York Press, 2008), 172–88. 61. Biko, I Write, 55. 62. Biko, I Write, 99. 63. Biko, I Write, 99–100. 64. Lamola, ‘Biko, Hegel’, 189. 65. R. Turner, The Eye of the Needle: Towards Participatory Democracy in South Africa (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1980), 4. 66. S. Friedman, ‘The Nemesis of the Suburbs: Richard Turner and South African Liberalism’, Theoria 64, no. 151 (2017): 10–19. 67. Turner, Eye of the Needle, 11. 68. Turner, Eye of the Needle, 12. 69. Turner, Eye of the Needle, 19. 70. Turner, Eye of the Needle, 23. 71. Turner, Eye of the Needle, 35. 72. Turner, Eye of the Needle, 36. 73. Turner, Eye of the Needle, 37–8. 74. Turner, Eye of the Needle, 38. 75. Turner, Eye of the Needle, 83. 76. Turner, Eye of the Needle, 89–90. 77. Turner, Eye of the Needle, 91. 78. S. Biko, ‘Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity’, originally printed in Black Theology: The South African Voice, ed. B. Moore (London: C. Hurst & Company, 1973), reproduced in Biko, I Write, 96–108. 79. Biko, I Write, 22. 80. Turner, Eye of the Needle, 101. 81. Biko, I Write, 45. 134 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

82. Biko, I Write, 169. 83. As Nigel Gibson has argued, the interaction between Turner and Biko is resonant of the debate between Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre, where Sartre dismissed négritude as ‘a minor term in the dialectic’, whereas for Fanon, ‘Black Consciousness . . . had to be understood as an absolute’. N. Gibson, ‘Black Consciousness after Biko: The Dialectics of Liberation in South Africa, 1977–1987’, in Biko Lives! Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko, ed. A. Mngxitama, A. Alexander and N.C. Gibson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 130. 84. Turner-Stylianou interview. See also P. Hudson, ‘Let’s Talk about Rick Turner’, Theoria 64 (2017): 1–9. 85. Ramphele, Across Boundaries, 62. 86. Turner, Eye of the Needle, 95–7. 87. Ramphele, Across Boundaries, 62. 88. Wilson, ‘Bantu Stephen Biko’, 43. 89. Cited in M. More, ‘Biko: Africana Existentialist Philosopher,’ in Biko Lives! Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko, ed. A. Mngxitama, A. Alexander and N.C. Gibson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 48. 90. More, ‘Biko’, 49. 91. R. Turner, ‘Memorandum to Commission of Inquiry into Certain Organisations’, 6, Richard Turner Papers, E.G. Malherbe Library, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban. 92. Biko, I Write, 57. 93. R. Turner, ‘Black Consciousness and White Liberals’, Reality (July 1972), in Karis and Gerhart, Nadir and Resurgence, 429. 94. Eddie Webster, interview, Johannesburg, 11 April 2014. 95. E. Webster, ‘Moral Decay and Social Reconstruction: Richard Turner and Radical Reform’, Theoria (October 1993): 2. 96. Biko, I Write, 99. 97. Gerhart, ‘Interview with Steve Biko’, 34. 98. ‘Editorial’, SASO Newsletter 1, no. 3 (August 1971): 2. http://disa.ukzn. ac.za/saaug71. 99. M. Ramphele, ‘Empowerment and Symbols of Hope: Black Consciousness and Community Development’, in Bounds of Possibility: The Legacy of Steve Biko and Black Consciousness, ed. B. Pityana, M. Ramphele, M. Mpumlwana and L. Wilson (Cape Town: David Philip, 1991), 158. 100. Ramphele, ‘Empowerment’, 158. 101. Ramphele, Across Boundaries, 63. 102. As Mzamane, Maaba and Biko put it: ‘BC was striving, in fact, to develop a unique organisational philosophy and set of strategies not only on how The ‘Durban Moment’, 1970–1974 135

to stand on one’s own feet but also how to work with other people without being used by them.’ M.V. Mzamane, B. Maaba and N. Biko, ‘The Black Consciousness Movement’ in South African Democracy Education Trust, The Road to Democracy in South Africa: Volume 2 (1970–1980) (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2006), 100. 103. M.P. Gwala, ed., Black Review 1973 (Durban: Black Community Programmes, 1973), 178. Morphet notes that in the 1970s, ‘the South African state authorities clearly identified the book as a work of theory which had exercised strong influence on opposition thinking since its publication’, Morphet, ‘Biographical Introduction’, vii. Morphet later reflected that his own name had become known to many people through his introduction, suspecting The Eye of the Needle ‘has a substantial hand to hand circulation’ and observing that most of those who knew Turner from the book ‘have been Black’, letter from T. Morphet to Glenn Moss, 8 February 1995, Richard Turner Papers, E.G. Malherbe Library, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban. Anthony Marx writes in a footnote to ‘Debates and Transitions within Black Consciousness’ that between 1975 and the uprising of June 1976 Turner’s book was ‘among the new ideas discussed in SASO’, Marx, Lessons of Struggle, 74. 104. See http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/mafika-pascal-gwala. Other members included Oswald Mtshali, Mongane Wally Serote, Njabulo Ndebele, Webster Makaza and Meshack Hlongwane. 105. Gwala, Black Review 1973, 178. 106. Gwala, Black Review 1973, 182. 107. T. Tyson, ‘Robert F. Williams, “Black Power,” and the Roots of the African American Freedom Struggle’, Journal of American History 85, no. 2 (1998): 541. 108. B.J. Langa, ed., Creativity and Black Development (Durban: SASO Publications, 1973), 13. 109. G. Davie, Poverty Knowledge in South Africa: A Social History of Human Science, 1855–2005 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 180. Moss, The New Radicals, 84, 153. 110. G. Davie, ‘Strength in Numbers: The Durban Student Wages Commission, Dockworkers and the Poverty Datum Line, 1971–1973’, Journal of Southern African Studies 33, no. 2 (June 2007): 402. 111. A. Lichtenstein, ‘Rick Turner, Participatory Democracy and Workers’ Control’, Theoria 64 (2017): 47–57. 112. Davie, ‘Strength in Numbers’, 405. 113. E. Webster, ‘The Impact of Intellectuals on the Labour Movement’, Transformation 18 (1992): 88. 136 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

114. Davie, Poverty Knowledge, 185. 115. S. Friedman, Building Tomorrow Today: African Workers in Trade Unions, 1970– 1984 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1987), 40–1. 116. S. Buhlungu, ‘Rebels without a Cause of Their Own? The Contradictory Location of White Officials in Black Unions in South Africa, 1973–94’, Current Sociology 54, no. 3 (2006): 445; J. Sithole and S. Ndlovu, ‘The Revival of the Labour Movement, 1970–1980’, in South African Democracy Education Trust, The Road to Democracy in South Africa: Volume 2 (1970–1980) (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2006), 188. 117. D. Lowry, 20 Years in the Labour Movement: The Urban Training Project and Change in South Africa, 1971–1991 (Johannesburg: Wadmore, 1999), cited in Buhlungu, ‘Rebels without a Cause’, 445. 118. Davie, ‘Strength in Numbers’, 407. See also, H. Keal, ‘ “A Life’s Work”: Harriet Bolton and Durban’s Trade Unions, 1944–1974’, Master’s thesis, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2009. 119. Cited in Davie, Poverty Knowledge, 185; Davie, ‘Strength in Numbers’, 407–8. 120. Davie, Poverty Knowledge, 186. 121. Davie, Poverty Knowledge, 188. 122. Davie, Poverty Knowledge, 189. 123. Davie, Poverty Knowledge, 190. 124. Davie, Poverty Knowledge, 193. 125. Morphet, ‘Brushing History’, 93. 126. Friedman, Building Tomorrow Today, 38–9. 127. ‘Durban Strikes and Wages Commission’, 126/4 1973, Gerhard Maré Collection, Alan Paton Centre, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg; ‘1973 Durban Strikes: 20th Anniversary’, unpublished pamphlet. 128. Friedman, Building Tomorrow Today, 496. 129. J. Brown, ‘The Durban Strikes of 1973: Political Identities and the Management of Protest’, in Popular Politics and Resistance Movements in South Africa, ed. W. Beinart and M.C. Dawson (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2010), 50; see also J. Brown, The Road to Soweto: Resistance and the Uprising of 16 June 1976 (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2016), Chapter 4. 130. Davie, Poverty Knowledge, 194. 131. Webster, ‘Impact of Intellectuals’, 89. 132. Webster, ‘Moral Decay’, 5–7. 133. Webster, ‘Moral Decay’, 1. 134. E. Webster, ‘Choosing to be Free: The Life Story of Rick Turner by Billy Keniston (Review)’, Transformation 85, no. 1 (2014): 151. The ‘Durban Moment’, 1970–1974 137

135. Webster, ‘Moral Decay’, 6. For more on Buthelezi, see G. Maré and C. Hamilton, An Appetite for Power: Buthelezi’s Inkatha and South Africa (Johannesburg: Ravan Press; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) and Mzala, Gatsha Buthelezi: Chief with a Double Agenda (London: Zed Books, 1988). 136. Webster, ‘Impact of Intellectuals’, 90. 137. Race Relations News 35, no. 4, (April 1973): 2. 138. D. Lewis, ‘Black Workers and Trade Unions’, in Karis and Gerhart, Nadir and Resurgence, 198. 139. Karis and Gerhart, Nadir and Resurgence, 133. 140. Cited in SASO Newsletter 3, no. 1 (1973): 17. http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/samar73. 141. R. Turner, ‘Memorandum to Commission of Inquiry into Certain Organisations’, 1, Richard Turner Papers, E.G. Malherbe Library, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban. 142. Karis and Gerhart, Nadir and Resurgence, 86–7, footnote 7. 143. P. Naidoo, ‘Who Killed Rick?’, 2, Richard Turner Papers, E.G. Malherbe Library, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban. 144. Hudson, ‘Let’s Talk about Rick Turner’. 145. R. de Kadt, ‘Editorial’, Theoria 64, no. 2 (2017): v–vii. 146. R. Erbmann, ‘ “Conservative Revolutionaries”: Anti-apartheid Activism at the University of Cape Town 1963–1973’. BA Hons thesis, Oxford University, 2005, Chapter 3. 147. NCFS press statement, 1 May 1973, CPSA AB1626/G, ASF Cathsoc, Church of the Province of South Africa Archives, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand. 148. Eddie Webster regretted that this clear, radical vision was subsequently lost in the 1990s, Webster, ‘Moral Decay’. 138 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

Chapter 4

Women’s Liberation and the Limits of Freedom

Ours was not a feminist cause at that time. Feminism was a later development in my political consciousness – but an insistence on being taken seriously as activists in our own right amongst our peers. ––– Mamphela Ramphele, Across Boundaries

[Deborah Matshoba:] We were in a way feminists. For instance we believed in Angela Davis. We believed in her and we admired the way she was . . . active in the Black Panther movement. ––– A. Alexander and A. Mngxitama, ‘Interview with Deborah Matshoba’

hese two recollections, one denying a feminist cause, the other Tembracing it, typify some of the contradictions in the memories of women who were active in the Black Consciousness Movement, indicative of what scholar Pumla Gqola has described as their ‘contradictory locations’ in the movement.1 Mamphela Ramphele was a prominent member of the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) group in Durban and provided significant information of their activities in her memoirs. Deborah Matshoba, a student at the University of Zululand and an active member of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), was for a time the literacy director for SASO until she was arrested and held in the Fort, Johannesburg, until December 1976. This chapter seeks to move beyond the way we met Ramphele in the last chapter, transcribing the thoughts of Biko, to explore her

138 Women’s Liberation and the Limits of Freedom 139 and other women’s roles with particular reference to the cause of what was known as women’s liberation. It argues that the ideas of women’s liberation were perceived as a threat for the political project of Black Consciousness, and thus SASO activists, including women, chose to distance themselves from the cause of women’s liberation.2 The emphasis of women’s liberation on the close and historically fundamental relationship between ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres struck a discordant chord with Black Consciousness, which similarly politicised the personal, but on the grounds of race, rather than gender. At the same time, though, women within the Movement adopted their own form of empowerment, as Matshoba describes above, that laid claim to the same psychological liberation as the ‘black man’. However, this chapter proceeds with the caveat that Raymond Suttner stresses: ‘The struggle to be a man . . . was essentially the struggle for dignity and the reclaiming of rights to be treated as an adult human being.’3

Historical struggles Whereas the uniqueness of Black Consciousness in relation to the politics of the African National Congress (ANC) and Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) has often been emphasised, there were strong similarities, with regard to gender equality, with SASO’s reticence to acknowledge the salience of ‘the woman’s question’, as M.J. Oshadi Mangena calls it.4 SASO was rooted in a rich history of women’s struggles against the state and a history of struggle for political representation by women against the patriarchy of the ANC leadership itself. Women were initially not admitted to membership when the South African National Native Congress formed in 1912, later to become the ANC in 1923. It was only nineteen years later, in 1931, that the Bantu Women’s League, under the leadership of Charlotte Maxeke, became affiliated to the ANC as its de facto women’s wing. Women were only formally admitted into the ANC in 1941 and the formation of the official ANC Women’s League only followed in 1948.5 Attempts to extend the carrying of passes to African women was a central factor that mobilised women in the 1950s and led to their famous 26 000-strong march on the Union Buildings in Pretoria in August 1956. The march was organised by the Federation of South African Women, which was affiliated to the ANC, drew support from the white 140 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

Congress of Democrats and included leaders like Helen Joseph.6 The 1956 march also had precedents, as the Union government’s decision to impose passes on African women in 1913 had evoked a similar show of defiance when women marched on Bloemfontein in protest, breaking with the ANC’s accepted approach where ‘deputations, petitions, and reasoned argument were the preferred tactics adopted by Congressmen at this stage’.7 In the same year, Indian women were involved in Gandhi’s passive resistance campaign, organised against the Immigration Act that forbade Indians residence in the Transvaal. Through their participation in Gandhi’s passive resistance, women were able to temporarily break ‘through the constraints of cultural, religious norms which strongly emphasised submissiveness and passivity in women’.8 In an analysis of the 1956 march, but making an observation that is more broadly applicable, the feminist scholar Shireen Hassim observes that rather than being remembered as women mobilising around a women’s issue, the protest was subsumed within a broader narrative of national liberation, ‘appropriated’ as ‘part of a popular front’ of Congress political activism.9 The uniqueness of the protest, mobilised specifically against the extension of passes to women, was downplayed, and the heroism of the women who took part in the march, with the implied challenge to the patriarchy of the traditional male leadership of the ANC itself, conveniently situated as part of the broader narrative of the 1950s’ . The sublimation of women’s struggles to a more generic ‘political’ struggle has been compounded by the theoretical literature, Hassim suggests, which has employed the theoretical concept of the ‘triple oppression’ of women (as women, as black and as workers). Hassim takes aim at the heuristic value of the concept and suggests the idea lacks depth, as it reinforces – rather than challenges – the assumption that the women’s struggle is only additive to the national and class struggle, rather than constituting a unique and particular form of oppression.10 To regard women’s struggles in this way, she concludes, gives the ubiquitous women’s wing theoretical justification, as its purpose is only to address women’s ‘additional’ concerns as differentiated from mainstream political goals. The result is a failure to challenge the hegemonic ‘male vision of the world’.11 Women’s Liberation and the Limits of Freedom 141

The ‘male vision of the world’ was, of course, not static. The political and economic changes of the 1960s and 1970s had profound impacts on what it meant to be a man, or a woman, at the time. Masculinity in South Africa was profoundly shaped by ‘class and race factors’, as Robert Morrell shows.12 Increased urbanisation gave rise to a new black masculinity, which, although ‘oppositional to the state’, still held conservative views on the place of women. By the 1970s, economic recession and the government’s increased repression combined to alter previous ideas of masculinity as associated with self-control and instead ‘a tough masculinity’ associated with Black Consciousness emerged, encapsulated by the slogan ‘Black man, you are on your own’.13 In the past this slogan has been used as a point of criticism, for favouring the black man over the black woman. In defence of Black Consciousness, some have argued that the apparent bias of the phrase in favour of men is the result of language then commonly accepted, where ‘man’ was equated with ‘human’. Daniel Magaziner has been one of the most recent scholars to suggest that this question requires closer historical scrutiny. He demonstrates that claims to black manhood were central to early articulations of Black Consciousness and argues that ‘manhood’ was ‘perhaps the most basic element of Black Consciousness efforts to recast black identity’.14 This chapter similarly makes the case for a more critical engagement with Black Consciousness and its relationship to women’s liberation. The need to restore black masculinity was a pressing one. Steve Biko, alluding to the historical changes already noted here, remarked that before the 1960s, black men ‘were oppressed but they were still men’.15 By the late 1960s, in contrast, he lamented: ‘The type of black man we have today has lost his manhood.’ Here it can be seen that Biko’s primary concern was with the oppressed black man, with the most painfully felt consequence being the loss of black manhood. The distinguished psychologist, author and academic Chabani Manganyi, who served as an intern at Baragwanath Hospital, Soweto, initially as part of his doctoral studies and then as a clinical psychologist for three years until 1973, concurred and described the situation faced by black men in apartheid South Africa as ‘one of feeling emasculated’.16 Black Consciousness was designed to address this problem, to make ‘the black man come to himself ’, to ‘pump back life into his empty shell; to 142 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS infuse him with pride and dignity, to remind him of his complicity in the crime of allowing himself to be misused’. This reclamation of lost manhood for Biko was synonymous with an ‘inward looking process’ and was the ‘definition of “black consciousness” ’.17 His vision was echoed by fellow leader and SASO president, Barney Pityana, who emphasised the ‘new vision’ of Black Consciousness as ‘hope and confidence [that] will give out sic[ ] more the “black personality.” It will give me, a black man, a sense of security and belonging.’18 In both formulations, evidently, the dominant concern was the rehabilitation of black masculinity. In a reflection on her involvement, written with hindsight in the early 1990s, Ramphele argues that women who were recognised as leaders in their own right had to become ‘one of the boys’ and, where successful, they were accorded ‘honorary male status’.19 Although women played an active, even ‘a crucial role’, as Mabel Maimela asserts in her doctoral study, without which Black Consciousness ‘could never have exerted the crucial influence that it did on the history of South Africa if the contribution had been absent’,20 their contribution was subsumed into the dominant discourse of black masculinity. Thus, even where a female activist like Ramphele insisted on equality, it was only granted to the extent that her stance was recognised in masculine terms. For Ramphele to become ‘one of the boys’ entailed adopting a ‘male’ identity, that equated the liberated black person with the black man. While a medical student at the University of Natal Black Section (UNB), Ramphele was able to grow in self-confidence and learnt to be aggressive towards men who were dismissive of her, noting, ‘I intimidated men who did not expect aggression from women.’21 As she remembers: ‘Soon a group of similarly inclined women, Vuyelwa Mashalaba, Nomsisi Kraai, Deborah Matshoba and Thenjiwe Mtintso, became a force to be reckoned with at annual SASO meetings.’ National women student leaders also emerged to play leading roles within the movement. As noted, Matshoba held the position as literacy director of SASO. Daphne Masekela was also a notable leader at Turfloop.22 One incident captured in the June 1971 issue of the SASO Newsletter was revealing. The article noted that SASO Executive member, Vuyelwa Mashalaba, had been sent to the campus of Fort Hare in May. As SASO president for 1971, Pityana was still banned Women’s Liberation and the Limits of Freedom 143 from Fort Hare for his purported involvement in the 1968 sit-in on the campus. The majority of students at Fort Hare were still reticent about forming a Student Representative Council (SRC), which could be targeted and manipulated by the university administration. But the hostility to overt political representation extended to SASO itself. The newsletter remarked that the local SASO leadership had ‘lost favour with the students’.23 The Fort Hare students also showed a worrying interest to participate in the multiracial student conference organised by the liberal University of the Witwatersrand SRC for July, an initiative that SASO had condemned in its newsletter the previous month, as a dangerous ‘red herring across the track’ for its attempt to stimulate ‘dialogue’ between white and black students.24 Mashalaba was sent to Fort Hare for SASO Day on 10 May 1971. This was a national celebration that SASO inaugurated that year, inspired by a Turfloop initiative the previous year. It set aside a week with the purpose of heightening student awareness and commitment to SASO on the campus. For the 1971 SASO Day celebrations Pityana addressed the University of the North, SASO vice president and international relations officer, Charles Sibisi, spoke at the University of Zululand, and Biko shared a platform with Gees Abram at a symposium at UNB on ‘Positivity in Negritude’.25 The topic of Mashalaba’s address was ‘Communication as a Facet of SASO Policy’, which she delivered to Fort Hare and the Federal Seminary at Alice. Mashalaba’s visit to Fort Hare was referred to enigmatically in the following month’s SASO Newsletter: ‘Her visit has apparently inspired the women-folk (who have always felt neglected at Fort Hare) more than anybody else.’ The statement was revealing. In a politically sensitive situation, where SASO needed to win over the student body to its policy and curtail dialogue with white organisations, Mashalaba’s address was particularly resonant with the ‘women-folk’ at Fort Hare. The description by the editor trivialised and deprecated the significance of the gathering. Mashalaba’s success in communicating an inspiring message to female students at Fort Hare, in contrast to the lack of support for SASO from the wider student body, suggests that she used her SASO mandate to address the particular concerns of female students at Fort Hare. The treatment of the event by the newsletter situated the concerns of ‘women-folk’ in parentheses, indicated a sidelining of their concerns. If Biko was 144 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS able to dedicate lengthy psychological analysis to the plight of black manhood, the concerns of black female students were evidently not considered as important. Bennie Khoapa, later to become director of the Black Community Programmes and who worked for the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in Durban, was also challenged by Mashalaba on his return from a visit to the United States for an alleged sexist comment he made. Beginning in 1968, Khoapa had taken a nine-month trip on the invitation of the YMCA in the United States and Canada. He arrived in Harlem three months after the assassination of Martin Luther King. On his return to South Africa in 1969, Dr Lawrence Schlemmer, a member of the South African Institute of Race Relations and a Senior Research Fellow of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Natal, asked Khoapa to speak at a seminar in Durban on his experiences in the United States.26 Khoapa had ‘lots to talk about’, among other things, his exposure to renewed debates of racial integration vis-à-vis separation in the United States, of whether Martin Luther King or Malcolm X had the correct approach. At the end of the seminar, Khoapa recalled that the discussion moved to address cultural change, particularly the ‘emergence of permissiveness’ and that he was challenged by ‘some feminists’ in the audience, particularly by Mashalaba, for an alleged sexist comment he made.27 These two instances involving Mashalaba support Matshoba’s view that ‘we were in a way feminists’ and contradict Ramphele’s assertion that ‘ours was not a feminist cause at that time’. Mashalaba combined her role as a member of the SASO Executive with a determination to address the particular concerns of female students and to challenge men for sexist comments. Khoapa’s memory also indicates that Mashalaba was not alone in this cause in Durban, noting the presence of other feminists. In mid-August of 1971, at a gathering of 26 African cultural organisations at the Ecumenical Lay Training Centre at Edendale, outside Pietermaritzburg, Biko shared the platform with Ellen Kuzwayo and Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, among others. Kuzwayo spoke on ‘The Role of Women in the New Society’.28 SASO had worked hard to initiate the conference, along with the Association for the Educational and Cultural Advancement of African People of South Africa (ASSECA) and the Inter-Denominational African Ministers Association of South Africa (IDAMASA), and the conference was Women’s Liberation and the Limits of Freedom 145 the first step towards the founding conference of the Black People’s Convention in Johannesburg in December 1971. The SASO Newsletter that covered the conference employed the term ‘the women folk’ again and commented that Kuzwayo’s presentation had made a strong impact, as it brought the ‘self-assertion by the women folk onto the mainstream of the strategy building’. Kuzwayo’s speech prioritised ‘self-assertion’ by women in a national context, distinctly with the political goal of the ‘new society’ that SASO, ASSECA and IDAMASA were working towards. It was to be a new society in which women had a voice and in which they asserted their rights. Biko’s speech to the conference did not comment explicitly on the role of women in what he called ‘modern African culture’, but the premise of his argument was that ‘one of the most fundamental aspects of our culture is the importance we attach to man. Ours has always been a man-centred society.’29 Whereas the tone of the remainder of the paper softened the jarringly sexist impact of Biko’s assertion, the question remains why he had not defined the nub of African culture as being ‘people-centred’ or ‘human-centred’. Kuzwayo’s paper had balanced the emphasis at the Edendale conference, but it was an intervention that had to be made nonetheless and would need to be made in the ‘new society’ through the ‘self-assertion of the women folk’. Kuzwayo thus needed to take a strong stand for ‘the self-assertion of women’ when she shared the platform with Biko. Whereas we have seen that some women in SASO could be described as ‘in a way feminists’, this did not extend to all women associated with the Black Consciousness Movement. Interaction within SASO extended beyond meetings and conferences to the personal relationships of individual participants in the Movement. Biko’s personal life involved multiple relationships with different women and he developed a reputation in some quarters, unfairly or not, as a womaniser. Biko was fond of partying and gumbas (parties) were a prominent feature of SASO social life. Memories of the gumbas and their legacy on the UNB Medical School were deeply problematic for many female students, who often felt objectified and used. The masculinities of the SASO student culture, closely aligned to a newly found political assertion, were difficult to distinguish from overt sexism towards women members of the student organisation. This 146 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS created a distinct culture at the UNB Medical School, lasting until the 1980s, which many female students remembered later with pain and bitterness.30 Sympathetic accounts of Biko’s womanising, such as that of Lindy Wilson, portray Biko as caught in a triangular love relationship between his wife, Ntsiki, and Ramphele, and resorting to casual relationships with other women as a source of escape, rather than revealing a misogynist streak in his character. Biko’s personal life did, however, show a conservatism that maintained more traditional expectations of the women he was involved with, to be faithful and dutiful, while he followed a more permissive moral code. Biko’s attitude was reflective of wider accepted norms among male students in the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) and was indeed reflective of a deeply patriarchal society that both black and white men were invested in. Xolela Mangcu writes of the ‘Duncan Innes trophy’ in recognition of the president’s ‘playboy image’, which would go to the man at the annual NUSAS conferences who had slept with the most women.31 This culture stretched back at least to the days of Jonty Driver, who recalled that ‘most of my friendships were based on drink and the pursuit of women, to tell the truth . . . with the benefit of hindsight, it became rather sexist’.32 Rick Turner, for one, also embraced an open attitude towards casual relationships with women as part of the 1960s’ idea of free love and this was one tension that contributed to the breakdown of his first marriage to Barbara Hubbard.33 Biko and SASO activists were thus part of a wider male student culture, which was accurately described as being sexist. But Black Consciousness could also be experienced in a very empowering way by black women. For example, notwithstanding their romantic involvement, Ramphele reflects on the emotional support she received from Biko as a comrade and a friend. Ramphele’s own account of her politicisation within SASO shows how the self-definition and empowerment that the Movement was all about could easily rub off on a competent and assertive individual like Ramphele. Through SASO’s national leadership conferences and formation schools, she developed critical leadership skills and political judgement. Together with her medical degree, earned at Durban Medical School, the training was vital to enable her to take a leading role in later running the Zanempilo Health Centre in the village of Zinyoka in the Women’s Liberation and the Limits of Freedom 147

Ciskei homeland.34 The clinic was predominantly run by women, as historian Leslie Hadfield observes; Ramphele worked as head medical officer with a team made up predominantly of women. 35 Many of the women involved in the Black Consciousness Movement were strong and articulate individuals. SASO activists embraced the student culture of the 1960s, with a rebellion against traditional taboos about alcohol and smoking. Heavy drinking on the weekends was a marked feature of student life at Alan Taylor Residence, leading to a broader characterisation of the Movement by some as consisting of drunkards. Women in the movement had to overcome the traditional resistance against women smoking and drinking to become fully integrated into SASO’s activities. Ramphele and her fellow female colleagues threw off the restraints of their conservative upbringings and adopted a risqué style of dress. Hot pants and platform shoes large enough to be used against the security police were favourites. The ‘Black is Beautiful’ slogan was adopted from the United States and SASO women stopped using the skin-lightening creams and wigs that were the mainstay of popular culture as presented through newspaper advertisements in papers such as Ilanga lase Natal.36 The traditional values of sobriety, restraint and decorum, applied most strictly to women, were thus thrown off as part of a ‘Black and Proud’ persona, inspired notably by Angela Davis and the female members of the Black Panthers. Matshoba reflects on this adopted identity when she remarks that they ‘believed in Angela Davis’ and her involvement in the Black Panther movement.37 The traditionally held, conservative views of African women required female SASO activists to be extreme in counteracting these perceptions. ‘As a woman, an African woman at that, one had to be outrageous to be heard, let alone taken seriously,’ Ramphele reflects.38 Donald Woods, the liberal editor of the Daily Dispatch in Port Elizabeth, remembers the shock he received when confronted in his office by the young and confident Ramphele, a ‘black bombshell of a girl’, demanding loudly to know why he was giving columns to the homeland leaders Mangosuthu Buthelezi and Kaiser Matanzima, and decrying Biko and Black Consciousness as a backward, aberrant and dangerous black racism.39 148 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

Traditional values were an additional political and personal challenge for black women like Ramphele, who were often expected to do the catering and household chores on SASO leadership weekends, in addition to their other roles. Ramphele and Matshoba both recall an occasion at the Zanempilo Health Centre when they forced their way into the traditional male preserve of savouring the sheep’s brain, a delicacy customarily barred to women.40 As Matshoba recalls vividly, SASO women ‘asserted’ themselves ‘in the organization’. She recounts that she ‘started smoking like [the men]. And especially to make this “gumba material” [non-SASO women] feel out of place. Smoking, and we wore our hot pants. We spoke loud!’ On some of the eating arrangements she comments: ‘We would get food and insist that [the men] should go and wash their hands so that we could all eat together. They wanted to take big portions for themselves. We’d say, “No, anybody who wants to eat, eats.” Just like that.’ Matshoba’s and Ramphele’s remarks show that the feminism that SASO women adopted was to a large extent embodied in their dress, habits and making a stand over the unfair balance of domestic duties. Matshoba’s remark about ‘gumba material’ referred to ‘outside’ women who were brought along to ‘add glamour to the parties’, but did not belong to the Black Consciousness Movement. The motives for making them ‘feel out of place’ could be explained by the fact that they were outsiders, but also because the outside women were more compliant and subservient. Fort Hare student activist Thenjiwe Mtintso emphasised: ‘We would have our revolts . . . They do want women to be political, to be active, to be everything, but they still need a complement of women who are subservient.’41 The outside women who had not been ‘conscientised’ and were regarded as subservient, undermined the embodied form of struggle and the hard-fought concessions that female activists had won within the Movement. By talking loudly, smoking and demanding equality in eating arrangements, female activists asserted their right to personal freedom from traditional constraints. The hostility to outside women, who typically gave in to pressures to fulfil more traditional roles, indicated that the stand black women activists took was vulnerable and at odds with prevailing norms. Women’s Liberation and the Limits of Freedom 149

Black Consciousness and the ‘Black Nation’ It emerged as a pattern for national liberation movements of southern Africa that women’s involvement in politics in the region until the 1980s ‘happened largely on terms set by men’.42 Although women often played a significant role in the nationalist movements, as ‘a major driving force sometimes egging on men and taking initiatives’, their ‘specific interests were subordinated under nationalist agendas’. The subordination of gender to a dominant, implicitly ‘masculinist’ national liberation focus held sway in the ANC, for example, until as late as the mid-1980s. Mavis Nhlapo, a representative of the ANC women’s secretariat, commented in 1981 that sexual politics and the problem of male domination were ‘secondary to the primary goal of the struggle’.43 At the 1985 Conference on Women in Nairobi, the ANC delegation argued that ‘it would be suicidal for us to adopt feminist ideas. Our enemy is the system and we cannot exhaust our energies on women’s issues.’ It was only at the end of the 1980s that the ANC became more responsive to the unique concerns of South African women. In 1989 the ANC organised seminars in London on ‘feminism and national liberation’, where participants were able to treat feminism as a legitimate concern in its own right for the first time. On 2 May 1990 the ANC issued its ‘Statement on the Emancipation of Women’, which dismissed the assumption that women’s emancipation would be a simple by-product of the democratic struggle. The ANC’s statement was ‘unprecedented in placing South African women’s resistance in an international context and in granting feminism independent historical agency’.44 As we have seen, Black Consciousness conformed to this trend in some ways, while at the same time women within the Movement resisted it. The real challenge SASO activists were alert to was the danger of potential division in the ranks of black solidarity that the women’s struggle could precipitate. SASO students were drawn from the urbanising black elite and the apartheid state envisaged that their future role was in local government in their respective homelands. The state’s attempts to divide black interests in this way called for vigilance from SASO and it followed that any initiative that could separate students from the people needed to be avoided. Matshoba would later remember that her attempt in the early 1970s to establish a women’s 150 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS student organisation in Durban, as a branch within SASO, was quickly vetoed by Biko and her male comrades. The danger would be, as Biko put it, ‘if you are WSO [Women’s Students Organisation] you are not SASO’ and ‘so now you have two roles’.45 Part of the threat that Matshoba posed was that she had a distinct identity as a woman who belonged to the YWCA. She had gained international exposure through that organisation when she represented South Africa at a YWCA conference in Ghana in 1971 and she had been mentored by the social workers and YWCA activists Ellen Kuzwayo and Joyce Seroke.46 Matshoba was sent to Durban by the YWCA ‘to mobilize young girls and recruit for the Y teens’ and she worked in the YWCA office, which was downstairs from the SASO office at 86 Beatrice Street.47 At the office Matshoba was heckled by ‘the SASO guys’ for her ‘bourgeois’ connections, which they equated with eating and drinking ‘biscuits and tea in meetings’, whereas ‘SASO guys’ ate ‘bunny chow’.48 Biko was alert to the challenge posed by Matshoba, although he dealt with the situation with characteristic humour and sensitivity. Speaking to Matshoba and noting the important role of women in the movement, Biko commented: ‘ “You guys have to admit you are very powerful” – that’s how Steve would put it,’ Matshoba recalls. But for Biko there was no possibility that a women’s student organisation, as ‘a branch within’ that Matshoba envisaged, could be formed. Biko’s deft handling of the situation still showed that the YWCA programme was viewed as a threat by SASO to its own attempts at conscientisation to create a united black front to challenge the apartheid state. Here competing progressive visions both laid claim to the oppressed and Biko moved to close down the second front that Matshoba wanted to establish. As the so-called ‘YWCA woman’ who wanted to ‘influence others’, Matshoba was viewed by the SASO activists as a potential threat to their own efforts to conscientise the people. While SASO was a radical student organisation, it conformed to a broader pattern evident in nationalist organisations such as the South West African People’s Organisation and the ANC, which conflated what was supposed to be women’s ‘traditional’ domestic roles with their political roles. Often, the creation of a distinct women’s organisation tended to result in ‘women’s specific concerns’ being ‘marginalised and depoliticised’, with women viewed primarily as ‘struggle helpers’.49 This Women’s Liberation and the Limits of Freedom 151 was repeated with the notable launch of an openly political women’s organisation in South Africa in 1975. ‘Former federation activists Fatima Meer in Natal and Winnie Mandela in the Transvaal’ launched the Black Women’s Federation (BWF) under the presidency of Meer.50 The preamble to the BWF, however, effectively defined women’s sphere of responsibility as the family and ‘socialization of the youth’. The BWF also linked the significance of motherhood to the fulfilment of black ‘social, cultural, economic and political aspirations’.51 The BWF was described by Jessie Duarte from the Federation of Transvaal Women as an ‘affirmation of Black women being upwardly mobile’, rather than a ‘women’s movement’.52 The organisation was short-lived as the state detained both Mandela and Meer, ‘along with other members of the Black Women’s Federation’ at the Fort in Johannesburg, following the Soweto Uprising, and the organsation was banned in 1977.53 Part of the inspiration for the stance taken by SASO with respect to women’s and men’s roles was drawn from Africa’s nationalist leaders, as activists easily wove black radical thought together with nationalism. The very first SASO Newsletter included a poem by the Senegalese president and poet Léopold Senghor that eulogised:

Naked woman, black woman I sing your beauty that passes, the form that I fix in the Eternal, Before jealous fate turns you to ashes to feed the roots of life.54

Drawing on the experience of the African liberation struggles helped to provide legitimacy for a narrow understanding of appropriate women’s roles. Even the independent and assertive Matshoba, who had suggested forming a women’s student organisation, reminded SASO Newsletter readers in 1973 of the central role women had played in independent black states.55 Matshoba equated this with their role as mothers, particularly stressing that ‘children need to be made aware in their early formative years’. Black children needed to ‘talk, eat, live, cry and play the struggle for liberation’. It was the responsibility of women to ‘plant this Black tree that is going to bear Black fruit’. Either a change had occurred in Matshoba, or she could still identify as a feminist while 152 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS embracing the idea that part of women’s particular contribution to the black struggle was in their particular role as mothers. This stance does warrant scrutiny, especially as in other respects, as we have seen, SASO women were very much like other student activists of the 1960s and 1970s, who read widely and thought critically. Part of SASO’s limitations in coming to terms with an emergent feminist critique was the result of Black Consciousness itself, which rhetorically rejected dialogue with white groups and viewed claims to women’s liberation with great suspicion. We saw in Chapter 1 how SASO activists had distanced themselves from so-called mixed movements, such as the University Christian Movement, and their attendant lack of political direction. The progressive ideas that the University Christian Movement imported to South African student circles through creative liturgies and discussion groups, which included an engagement with feminist critiques of the world, were regarded warily by SASO activists.56 It was a loss of the correct focus in the struggle against apartheid that was the ever-present concern. In addressing the oppression of women, the crucial point was that the primacy of black solidarity could be lost. Unlike the claim that women’s liberation was overlooked by SASO in its preoccupation with black solidarity, we have seen rather that SASO’s position was more clearly defined in opposition to women’s liberation. The central Black Consciousness ideas of oppression and liberation, which held race to be the key determinate of oppression, was unsettled by claims for women’s liberation, as it was by the growing class-based analysis of South African society (as examined in the previous chapter) and was therefore rejected. It was this danger, surely, that Black Consciousness activists resisted – not for the motive of preserving male power within the organisation because, as we have seen, women already wielded much power within SASO and could appropriate the language of Black Consciousness as well. What was particularly undermining about women’s liberation was that it could separate black women from ‘the people’ and could play into the hands of the state’s attempts to co-opt a small black middle class into the limited political horizons of the homelands. A short article that appeared in the SASO Newsletter in 1975 by Daphne Masekela looked to settle the question of ‘What is a liberated woman?’ She argued that ‘the real meaning of this concept for the Black woman Women’s Liberation and the Limits of Freedom 153 must be sought outside the scope of what is commonly known as women’s libbers in the white society’.57 This was because ‘women’s lib’ was perceived as ‘the articulation of interests that pertain to one section of the community only, the community of women’ and that it ran ‘parallel to our political aspirations as a Black Nation’. Women’s liberation, Masekela concluded, was ‘a rather dangerous red herring thrown across the path of the struggle for real liberation’. The black middle class, where the bulk of ‘women’s lib’ activity occurred, had ‘fully absorbed white values to an amazing degree’. The writer asserted that black women had ‘to go it alone’ because ‘the oppressed and the oppressor’ could ‘never discuss adequately what the political situation is’, thus rejecting any cross-racial solidarity that would draw women together on the basis of their struggle against patriarchy. While the writer acknowledged that there was a need for self-criticism, and recognised that black women were ‘third grade citizens’, there was a danger and slipperiness in ‘evident truth’. As the struggle unfolded and broadened, there was ‘a more urgent need’ to be ‘bound by ties of nationalism but much more by common scars and wounds suffered at the hands of White oppression’.

Women’s liberation in South Africa in the 1970s Who were the ‘women’s libbers’ that Masekela and others referred to? Within liberal white circles such as the , NUSAS and sections of the churches, on which Black Consciousness activists had focused such pointed criticism, women’s liberation had gained greater currency by the early 1970s. This was noted in a special issue on women and the church in the Christian journal Pro Veritate in September 1971. Editor and executive member of the Christian Institute, Bruckner de Villiers, played on the often quoted words of Jesus when he commented in his editorial: ‘Women who, like the poor, have always been and will always be with us have in recent times become News [sic] in a very big way. They form, in our day, a topic of such actuality that a journal like ours can hardly afford to ignore them.’58 De Villiers’ clumsily put and perhaps inappropriately playful reference to the importance of recognising the position of women in society illustrated well the newness of the concepts, but showed that they demanded attention nonetheless. 154 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

The danger that Masekela and others sensed was illustrated in the same issue, by Shirley Moore and Sheila Morton, who pointed out what appeared to them to be a self-evident congruence between women’s liberation and black liberation:

We in South Africa who are aware of oppression tend to be far more aware of the need for black/white liberation rather than male/female liberation and are hardly aware of the links between. American women have stated quite categorically that until they (the women) become identified with the Blacks there shall be no liberation!!59

To this observation, they added: ‘In South Africa, if white women are becoming aware of a male oppressive society, how much more aware must the Black woman become to bring about her liberation? Far be it from us to speak of the Black woman’s plight – it is part of her liberation to speak for herself.’60 Their article emphasised the charged debate around what constituted the struggle for liberation and what constituted personal freedom. These were questions that Black Consciousness activists had posed their own answers to and the similarities in the struggle for ‘male/ female’ and ‘black/white liberation’ were potentially undermining. Black Consciousness leaders maintained a prescriptive vision of liberation and the clamour for male/female liberation confused their basis for political mobilisation. The Pro Veritate article admittedly ignored the fundamentally different positions of black and white women in relation to the state. As Cherryl Walker observed in 1982, in South Africa ‘white women could, for the most part, look to the white state for the protection of their interests and for reforms in areas where they still felt themselves to be discriminated against as women’, whereas for black women, ‘reforms in their subordinate status as women required radical changes in the very nature of the state itself ’.61 This was one reason why political organisation among black women developed in line with the national liberation struggle, rather than developing a distinct and separate feminist politics. It was the white supremacist state, not just patriarchy as an entrenched system, which represented the main instrument of Women’s Liberation and the Limits of Freedom 155 oppression for black women and the assumption was that with its removal the focus could then shift to address patriarchy and women’s rights. White and black women thus stood in a fundamentally different relationship to each other, which the North American feminism Moore and Morton referred to did not account for. This did not prevent white liberals from drawing attention, and most likely infuriating SASO’s members for their paternalism, to the particular plight of African women. On 18 February 1971 the outspoken critic of the apartheid government and Progressive Party Member of Parliament for the Johannesburg constituency of Houghton, Helen Suzman, presented a ‘Charter for Women’ to the South African Parliament on behalf of the Black Sash.62 Jean Sinclair, the president of the Black Sash, had overseen the drawing up of the Charter in consultation with a professor of constitutional law and had circulated the document to a wide range of organisations and women’s organisations in particular, with a request that they formally adopt the Charter. The document was a statement of rights, which appeared ‘to be so fundamental as not to need stating at all’.63 They included the freedom to live with one’s spouse of choice, access to free education, freedom of residence and movement, and the right to own and rent property. Apartheid denied African women even these most basic of human privileges. Sinclair was of the opinion that ‘there can be no woman who will not support [the Charter’s] nine clauses’ and it followed that apartheid violated the fundamental human rights of African women.64 The intention of the Charter and the Black Sash campaign was to ‘ameliorate the plight of African women’. But the campaign and the Charter also resonated with the changing awareness of ‘the actuality’ of women’s struggles, as Bruckner de Villiers had clumsily put it. De Villiers’ own position was also problematic. A group of women meeting at the Wilgespruit Fellowship Centre outside Johannesburg in August 1971 critiqued the Christian Institute as a male-dominated organisation. The women met as part of the centre’s Personal Relations and Organizational Development programmes, for which Turfloop student leader Daphne Masekela was a consultant. Joan O’Leary, the co-director of the programme, mentioned that the group included ‘Jews, Christians, agnostics and atheists, nuns, ex-nuns and radical 156 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS young students from the Women’s Lib. movement’.65 O’Leary’s report on the workshop indicated that it had been an introduction for many of the women involved and acknowledged that much groundwork still needed to be done. She ended with a comparison that again signalled much of the danger Black Consciousness activists sensed in feminism. O’Leary described the ‘exhilarating experience’ of meeting as women and commented that ‘there was something of the joy and freedom among the women that is perhaps also felt by black power groups when they meet together’.66 Here, the carefully developed Black Consciousness formulation of exactly who constituted ‘Black’, as those people of colour who were historically oppressed, was threatened with a potential diversion: a solidarity that shifted the prime identification away from race. By her comparison, O’Leary indicated that the monopoly on freedom that Black Consciousness activists argued was the sole preserve of the authentically ‘Black man’, who had given himself wholly to the struggle, could also be prefigured by women who used their common sex as the basis for their solidarity and societal critique.

Legacy and impacts As we have seen, Black Consciousness incorporated conservative views on the role of women, drawing no doubt partially from other nationalist struggles in Africa. But it also held elements of individual empowerment, which could be appropriated by men and women. In a 1994 interview, trade union leader and founder of the Catering and Commercial Allied Workers’ , Emma Mashinini, acknowledged her indebtedness to Black Consciousness. ‘I think Black Consciousness made us,’ she later reflected. It meant ‘Black man, black person, black woman, wake up, stand up for yourselves, and know who you are’.67 Here Mashinini easily equated the ‘man’ of Black Consciousness with the generic ‘human’ or ‘woman’. Another prominent black woman activist and mentor to Matshoba, Ellen Kuzwayo, who was active in the 1970s with the YWCA mirrored this sentiment. In her autobiography Kuzwayo recounts giving testimony in a court in the 1980s where she strongly defended the credentials of Black Consciousness. As she told the court, ‘I believe in Black Consciousness’ and described it as ‘an institution’ and ‘a process whereby blacks in South Africa were Women’s Liberation and the Limits of Freedom 157 beginning to take a serious look at themselves’.68 Mirroring Ramphele’s experience of experiencing Black Consciousness as empowering and therefore being accorded ‘honorary male status’, after her testimony in court the father of one of the accused hugged Kuzwayo and said, ‘ “You are not an ordinary woman, you pleaded like a man, only a man could speak the way you did.” ’ If this was evidence of the positive impact of Black Consciousness on a female activist, the literary scholar Dorothy Driver’s analysis of Kuzwayo’s autobiography has drawn attention to her narrative attempt to mediate the more prescriptive elements of Black Consciousness.69 On the one hand, Kuzwayo’s book has been read as a powerful triumph of ‘wholeness attained by the transitional woman’. As the novelist Nadine Gordimer would note in her preface to Kuzwayo’s book, Kuzwayo had ‘Africanised the Western concept of woman and in herself achieved a synthesis with meaning for all who experience cultural conflict’.70 Kuzwayo’s experience of cultural conflict extended to her choice to identify herself as a ‘woman’, rather than a ‘mother’ in her title, indicating that not all black women were content to be defined solely as mothers. As Driver notes: ‘[T]hat the term “woman” is used rather than “mother” suggests that some space is being claimed for the voices of women beyond the careful definitions of the mother in the discourse of Black Consciousness.’71 If Black Consciousness needed to be mediated and selectively appropriated, there was still the danger in going too far in self-assertion, as it could be associated with an ‘individualistic’ Western feminism that divorced individual rights from the greater struggle of the people. This was a wider tension that also structured the response of ANC activists to feminism into the 1980s. Gloria Mtungwa’s short poem ‘Militant Beauty’ juxtaposed

Distorted women’s lib refusing to mother kids and provide family comfort harassing a tired enslaved dad with the militant beauty of the woman for whom ‘luxurious apartments and flashy cars / have never been their aspiration’, but rather 158 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

Flowering in natural beauty through progressive ideology . . . overcame imposed passivity and became essence [sic] of militancy.72

Mtungwa’s poem captures the perceived convergence between a particular kind of Western feminism with a selfish, individualistic pursuit of materialistic comforts. Mtungwa’s contrast of the ‘militant beauty’ of the woman who had rejected these values and embraced the role of mother, rejected by ‘women’s lib’, explains some of the hostility to feminism. It was perceived as narrow and selfish, in contrast to the woman who welcomed her role as mother and by extension contributed to a higher political goal. For Black Consciousness activists, it was the blurry potential congruency between feminism and Black Consciousness that was part of the threat feminism posed. The search for a reconstructed self that black activists advocated bore close parallels to the feminist project, as both ‘feminism and Black Consciousness . . . felt the need for a community which will not continually make them “other” ’, allowing them to speak without the constraint of patriarchy on one hand, and ‘white domination, on the other’.73 It was partly this uncomfortable resonance that made feminism a dangerous diversion. Indeed, it was constitutive of the discourse to ‘eclipse the female’ with a rhetorical ‘emphasis on black experience and black perspective’.

Conclusions By the mid-1970s government repression did much to loosen and change the initial relationships between men and women within SASO. When Biko left Durban in 1973 because of his banning order, he was able to set up a new hub of activity in King William’s Town, drawing on funding received through the second phase of the Study Project on Christianity in Apartheid Society (SPRO-CAS) under the aegis of the Black Community Programmes. The community set up there was powerfully affirming for those involved, as remembered by Thenjiwe Mtintso, a SASO activist expelled from the University of Fort Hare, who worked as a reporter for Donald Woods’ Daily Dispatch. As she would later reflect, ‘that community, around Steve, around King Women’s Liberation and the Limits of Freedom 159

William’s Town, it really made us. It really made the good parts of me.’74 Biko, for his part, was particularly impressed by the courage of Mtintso, who was tortured by the Special Branch after being detained.75 After his own banning, Biko was also increasingly reliant on Ramphele as a ‘sounding-board in his political thinking’ in King William’s Town and was confronted by her position as a professional doctor with an independent and secure income.76 As a result of Biko’s own restrictions, as well the impetus of the Black Community Programmes, community development projects became more prominent, with women taking leading roles, such as at the Zanempilo Health Centre. Indeed, as Hadfield notes, ‘if not for one male doctor, two male ambulance drivers, and political visitors, Zanempilo would have been dominated by women. Ramphele served as head medical officer, Pumla Sangotsha as a secretary and social worker, and the clinic had up to seven female nurses.’77 Thus, through circumstances, members of the Movement were forced to rely on women in ways that exceeded the initial prescriptions of their roles. Aelred Stubbs evocatively described Zanempilo as ‘the incarnate symbol of Black Consciousness’ because the spirit of Black Consciousness was ‘expressed in the black-designed, black-built buildings, but above all in the staff who serviced it’.78 It is evident that if Zanempilo was the incarnate symbol of Black Consciousness, it was a symbol that foregrounded empowered women. In her biographical essay on Biko, Wilson suggests that it was only a matter of time before Biko would have had to acknowledge ‘the existence of sexism as a destructive “ism” ’.79 In contrast, this chapter has argued that the issue of sexism did have political currency in SASO circles. It is thus Matshoba’s recollection in the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter that seems to resonate within the Movement more broadly, that some female activists at least were ‘in a way feminists’. They looked to role models like Angela Davis and were encouraged to adopt a tough femininity, which led them to be hostile towards the women who were on the periphery of the movement as ‘gumba material’. Wilson’s portrayal of Biko as unaware of sexism does not match this historical record. It appears instead that feminism was deliberately muted by SASO and that sexism was purposely relegated to secondary importance as racist exploitation was the necessary prime focus. SASO viewed the ‘woman’s question’ as a ‘Western discourse’, which 160 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS resonated discordantly with Black Consciousness. SASO activists’ rejection of feminism as ‘Western’ and ‘imperialistic’ and its rhetorical prescription of traditional roles indicate that Black Consciousness was forced to set limits to what it envisaged as liberation. While the discourse that Biko, Pityana and the SASO student leaders constructed overlooked this, it was left to the women within the Movement to take the initiative and to appropriate the ‘liberated man’ for themselves.

Notes 1. P. Gqola, ‘Contradictory Locations: Blackwomen and the Discourse of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) in South Africa’, Meridians 2, no. 1 (2001): 130–52. 2. An earlier version of this chapter appeared as I. Macqueen, ‘Categories of Struggle: Reassessing Black Consciousness in South Africa through Gender, 1967–1976’, in Paths to Gender: European Historical Perspectives on Women and Men, ed. C. Salvaterra and B. Waaldijk (Pisa: Plus-Pisa University Press, 2009), 259–70. 3. R. Suttner, The ANC Underground in South Africa to 1976: A Social and Historical Study (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2008), 112. 4. Mangena claims that in the Black Consciousness Movement concerns about ‘gender sensitivity’ were tacitly endorsed through the acknowledgement of women as competent leaders in their own right. She maintains that an overt concern with women’s emancipation was downplayed and that ‘gender was blurred and dissolved into the larger and deeper struggle for the liberation of the Black people’. M.J. Oshadi Mangena, ‘The Black Consciousness Philosophy and the Woman’s Question, 1970–1980’, in Biko Lives! Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko, ed. A. Mngxitama, A. Alexander and N.C. Gibson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 253–66. 5. ‘A Short History of the ANC Women’s League’. http://www.anc.org.za/ content/short-history-womens-league. 6. T. Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa since 1945 (New York: Longman, 1983), 144. 7. S. Dubow, The African National Congress (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2000), 6. 8. C. Walker, ‘The Woman’s Suffrage Movement in South Africa’, Communications 2, Centre of African Studies, University of Cape Town (1979): 32. 9. S. Hassim, ‘Gender, Social Location, and Feminist Politics in South Africa’, Transformation 15 (1991): 69. 10. Hassim, ‘Gender, Social Location’: 68–9. Women’s Liberation and the Limits of Freedom 161

11. Hassim, ‘Gender, Social Location’: 75. 12. R. Morrell, ‘Of Boys and Men: Masculinity and Gender in Southern African Studies’, Journal of Southern African Studies 24, no. 4 (1998): 607. 13. Morrell, ‘Of Boys and Men’, 627. 14. D.R. Magaziner, ‘Pieces of a (Wo)Man: Feminism, Gender and Adulthood in Black Consciousness, 1968–1977’, Journal of Southern African Studies 37, no. 1 (2011), 45–61. 15. S. Biko, I Write What I Like (Johannesburg: Picador Africa, 2004), 30. 16. N.C. Manganyi, Being-Black-in-the-World (Johannesburg: SPRO-CAS/Ravan Press, 1973), 10–11, cited in D. Driver, ‘M’a-Ngoana O Tsoare Thipa ka Bohaleng – The Child’s Mother Grabs the Sharp End of the Knife: Women as Mothers, Women as Writers’, in Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture, ed. M. Trump (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1990), 235. 17. Biko, I Write, 31. 18. N. Pityana, ‘The Politics of Powerlessness,’ SASO Newsletter (September 1970): 10. http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/saso-newsletter-september-1970. 19. M.A. Ramphele, ‘The Dynamics of Gender with Black Consciousness Movement in the Seventies: Continuities and Discontinuities in Current Liberation Movements’, African Pamphlet Collection. http://www.indiana. edu/~afrcol/items/show/15824. 20. M.R. Maimela, ‘Black Consciousness and White Liberals in South Africa: Paradoxical Anti-apartheid Politics’, Ph.D. diss., University of South Africa, 1999, 16. 21. M. Ramphele, Across Boundaries: The Journey of a South African Woman Leader (New York: The Feminist Press, 1996), 66. 22. M.V. Mzamane, B. Maaba and N. Biko, ‘The Black Consciousness Movement’, in South African Democracy Education Trust, The Road to Democracy in South Africa: Volume 2 (1970–1980) (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2006), 135. 23. SASO Newsletter 1, no. 2 (June 1971): 5. http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/sajun71. 24. SASO Newsletter 1, no. 1 (May 1971): 11. http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/samay71. 25. SASO Newsletter 1, no. 2 (June 1971): 9. http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/sajun71. 26. M. Horrell, A Survey of Race Relations in South Africa, 1968 (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1969), 16. 27. Bennie Khoapa, interview with David Wiley, 7 May 2006, Durban. My thanks to David Trumbull for this reference. http://overcomingapartheid.msu.edu/ video.php?id=84. 28. SASO Newsletter 1, no. 4 (September 1971): 4. http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/sasep71. 29. Biko, I Write, 45; emphasis added. 162 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

30. V. Noble, ‘Doctors Divided: Gender, Race and Class Anomalies in the Production of Black Medical Doctors in Apartheid South Africa, 1948 to 1994’, Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2005, Chapter 5. 31. X. Mangcu, Biko: A Biography (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2012), 133. 32. Cited in M.A. Beale, ‘Apartheid and University Education, 1948–1970’, Ph.D. diss., University of the Witwatersrand, 1998, 455. 33. Barbara Follett, interview in Jann Turner’s documentary film,My Father, Rick Turner. http://www.barbara-follett.org.uk/richard_turner/part_1.html. 34. L. Hadfield, ‘Biko, Black Consciousness, and “the System” eZinyoka: Oral History and Black Consciousness in Practice in a Rural Ciskei Village’, South African Historical Journal 62, no. 1 (March 2010): 78–99. See also L. Hadfield, ‘Restoring Human Dignity and Building Self-Reliance: Youth, Women and Churches and Black Consciousness Community Development, South Africa, 1969–1977’, Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 2010. 35. Hadfield, ‘Biko, Black Consciousness’: 94. 36. See L.M. Thomas, ‘Skin Lighteners in South Africa: Transnational Entanglements and Technologies of the Self ’, in Shades of Difference: Why Skin Colour Matters, ed. E.N. Glenn (Standford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 188–209. 37. A. Alexander and A. Mngxitama, ‘Interview with Deborah Matshoba’, in Biko Lives! Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko, ed. A. Mngxitama, A. Alexander and N.C. Gibson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 281. 38. Ramphele, Across Boundaries, 71. 39. D. Woods, Biko (London: Paddington Press, 1978), 47. 40. Ramphele, Across Boundaries, 105; Alexander and Mngxitama, ‘Interview with Deborah Matshoba’, 280. 41. Alexander and Mngxitama, ‘Interview with Deborah Matshoba’, 280. 42. G. Geisler, Women and the Remaking of Politics in Southern Africa: Negotiating Autonomy, Incorporation and Representation (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2004), 23. 43. A. McClintock, ‘ “No Longer in a Future Heaven”: Women and Nationalism in South Africa’, Transition 51 (1991): 118. 44. McClintock, ‘ “No Longer in a Future Heaven” ’: 119. 45. Alexander and Mngxitama, ‘Interview with Deborah Matshoba’, 279. 46. Alexander and Mngxitama, ‘Interview with Deborah Matshoba’, 280. 47. Alexander and Mngxitama, ‘Interview with Deborah Matshoba’, 279. 48. Alexander and Mngxitama, ‘Interview with Deborah Matshoba’, 281. ‘Bunny chow’ is a reference to a popular food in Durban, consisting of curry served inside a loaf of bread. 49. Geisler, Women and the Remaking of Politics, 23–4. Women’s Liberation and the Limits of Freedom 163

50. S. Hassim, Women’s Organizations and Democracy in South Africa: Contesting Authority (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 61. 51. A. Rambally, ed., Black Review 1975–6 (Lovedale: Black Community Programmes, 1977), 133. Cited in K. Moodley, ‘The Continued Impact of Black Consciousness,’ in Bounds of Possibility: The Legacy of Steve Biko and Black Consciousness, ed. B. Pityana, M. Ramphele, M. Mpumlwana and L. Wilson (Cape Town: David Philip, 1991), 147–8. 52. Cited in Hassim, Women’s Organisations, 61. 53. ‘Professor Fatima Meer’. http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/professor- fatima-meer. 54. SASO Newsletter August 1970: 7. http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/saaug70. 55. D. Matshoba, ‘Woman: Whither Thou?’, SASO Newsletter 3, no. 1 (March/ April 1973): 5. http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/samar73. 56. Magaziner, ‘Pieces of a (Wo)Man’: 49–52. 57. ‘Building a Nation: Black Women’s Power’, SASO Newsletter 5, no. 2 (July/ August 1975): 7–8. http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/sajul75. 58. W.B. de Villiers, ‘Women and the Church’, Pro Veritate 10, no. 5 (September 1971): 1. https://www.aluka.org/struggles/collection/PSARR. See Matthew 26:11: ‘The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me’ and also John 12:8: ‘You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me’ (New International Version). 59. S. Moore and S. Morton, ‘Women’s Liberation in South Africa’, Pro Veritate 10, no. 5 (September 1971): 5. https://www.aluka.org/struggles/collection/ PSARR. 60. Moore and Morton, ‘Women’s Liberation’: 5. 61. C. Walker, Women and Resistance in South Africa (London: Onyx Press, 1982), 151. 62. J. Sinclair, ‘Letter from the Black Sash’, Pro Veritate 10, no. 5 (September 1971): 14. https://www.aluka.org/struggles/collection/PSARR. 63. ‘Charter for Women’, Pro Veritate 10, no. 5 (September 1971): 7. https:// www.aluka.org/struggles/collection/PSARR. 64. Sinclair, ‘Letter from the Black Sash’: 14. 65. J. O’Leary, ‘On Being a Person’, Pro Veritate 10, no. 6 (October 1971): 8. https://www.aluka.org/struggles/collection/PSARR. 66. O’Leary, ‘On Being a Person’, 25. 67. G. Davis, ‘I Speak as a Woman Person: Geoffrey Davis Interviews Emma Mashinini’, Kunapipi 16, no. 1 (1994): 580–1. See also E. Mashinini, Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life (London: The Women’s Press, 1989; New York: Routledge, 1991). 68. E. Kuzwayo, Call Me Woman (London: The Women’s Press, 1985), 226–7. 164 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

69. Driver, ‘M’a-Ngoana’. 70. N. Gordimer, ‘Preface’, in Kuzwayo, Call Me Woman, xi. Again, there is a similarity with Ramphele, who in the last chapters of her memoir, ‘Forging an Independent Lifestyle’ and ‘Stretching across Boundaries’, describes her personal journey to a sense of wholeness. 71. Driver, ‘Women as Mothers, Women as Writers,’ 238-9. 72. Sechaba, 12, 4th Quarter (1978), 64. http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/ sechaba-volume-12-fourth-quarter-1978. 73. Driver, ‘M’a-Ngoana’, 232. 74. Cited in L. Wilson, ‘Bantu Stephen Biko: A Life’, in Bounds of Possibility: The Legacy of Steve Biko and Black Consciousness, ed. B. Pityana, M. Ramphele, M. Mpumlwana and L. Wilson (Cape Town: David Philip, 1991), 52. 75. Wilson, ‘Bantu Stephen Biko’, 60–1. 76. Wilson, ‘Bantu Stephen Biko’, 61. 77. Hadfield, ‘Biko, Black Consciousness’, 94. 78. A. Stubbs, ‘Martyr of Hope: A Personal Memoir by Aelred Stubbs, CR’, in S. Biko, I Write What I Like: A Selection of His Writings (London: Penguin, 1978), 192. 79. Wilson, ‘Bantu Stephen Biko’, 60–1. The Radicalisation of the Christian Institute 165

Chapter 5

The Radicalisation of the Christian Institute

. . . to support black initiative, and to work with whites in responding creatively to black initiative. ––– ‘SPRO-CAS 2 is an Action Programme’1

hen Steve Biko, Thenjiwe Mtintso and others set up a new Wcommunity in King William’s Town in 1973, they drew their main financial support from the Black Community Programmes (BCP), funded by the Christian Institute as part of the second stage of the Study Project on Christianity in Apartheid Society (SPRO-CAS). Between 1971 and 1972, the Christian Institute was ‘on the brink of a major reorientation’.2 Challenged by the leaders of the Black Consciousness Movement with regard to the weakness of liberal solutions, they launched SPRO-CAS 2 as the BCP under the directorship of Bennie Khoapa and Biko, with a separate, white ‘conscientisation’ project under Horst Kleinschmidt, a past executive member of the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). This chapter seeks to explain how this close relationship came about. The idea of shockwaves to progressive organisations is explored, meaning a politically and emotionally charged rhetoric that shook nominal progressives to more fully appreciate political and social reality as experienced by black South Africans and to take a more radical stand. We have already seen such shockwaves in relation to NUSAS and the University Christian Movement (UCM), as the rhetoric of Black Consciousness challenged activists in those groups. The historian Peter Walshe has written the most authoritative account of the Christian Institute to date.3 This chapter builds on his work while drawing on

165 166 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS additional primary research and situating the account of the Christian Institute more fully into the history of Black Consciousness in South Africa. It is offered as another example of a set of interlocutors who engaged with the activists of the Black Consciousness Movement, exploring the consequences of this engagement, rather than attempting to be an authoritative overview of the Christian Institute. Although the Christian Institute is the main focus in this chapter, it is also broadly concerned with the impact of Black Consciousness on the churches and individual Christians in the 1970s.

The Christian Institute The Christian Institute was among the most progressive institutions that worked within the ambit that the state provided. But as a white- run, white-funded Christian body, it essentially replicated the pattern of power relations that had been a marked feature of Christianity in South Africa. In seeking meaningful change, the organisation’s leaders and members were increasingly thrown up against their own limitations as a white-run organisation. Although the executive tried to address the problem with the recruitment of a new ‘tough minded black leadership’, as Walshe observes, the attempt to recruit black leaders was done only belatedly.4 But the role played by black leaders was less overt than being office holders and their influence preceded the Christian Institute’s own belated attempts to open the organisation to black participation. It was the early contacts with the forceful characters of the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) that helped to push members of the Christian Institute towards a more radical position, particularly Beyers Naudé who met Biko in 1971.5 This is one of the examples of what this chapter and the book as a whole characterise as the ‘shockwaves’ of Black Consciousness, and is part of the case I make for recognising the wider impact of Black Consciousness on South African society. Part of the power of the influence of SASO leaders was through personal challenge to the leaders of the Christian Institute. This was particularly true of Naudé. He had been born into a staunchly conservative family and had studied at Stellenbosch University in 1932. He was lectured in sociology by Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, later arch-apartheid architect, and he sparred with future prime minister John Vorster in one of the university’s two debating societies. 6 The Radicalisation of the Christian Institute 167

At university he met Ilse Hedwig Weder, who was the daughter of Moravian missionaries based at Genadendal in the Western Cape, and who later became his wife. The Moravians first established a mission at Genadendal in 1737, and later resumed in 1791.7 Through his visits to Ilse’s family, Naudé was exposed to the Moravians’ close co-operation with the Coloured community, particularly their mixed worship at church services. These visits to the Moravian mission station sparked his later interest in ‘race relations and missionary work’.8 Naudé’s second conversion, following his first conversion to the Christian faith, from a nationalist-supporting dominee (minister) to a liberal activist, is well known and well documented.9 A major event in this personal change can be dated to the Cottesloe Consultation of 1960. His third, and less well-known metamorphosis, was from a liberal to a radical. Former Methodist minister Cedric Mayson argued that Naudé’s change of heart came about because Naudé came to personally know black people. This was, according to Mayson, ‘a central theme in everybody who made that change’.10 Reflecting on his relationship with Biko, Naudé noted how much he had learnt, specifically the need to relinquish leadership of the struggle to blacks and for the white community to ‘get rid of the old spirit of paternalism, of white liberalism, to say to the black community: Over to you.’11 This personal engagement with black people, where whites learned first-hand of the psychological and social effects of apartheid, was a significant stimulus in overturning inherited patterns of white thinking. Naudé and the Christian Institute equated the rejection of racism with Christian repentance, or ‘metanoia’. The term implied a radical rethinking of life values and orientation, ‘a radical change in man’s thinking and a conversion . . . away from all forms of selfishness, toward God and his fellow men’.12 This change demanded action. In a two-part paper, published in Pro Veritate, Mark Collier, an ex-student of the Dominican seminary at Stellenbosch, who had quit his studies in 1968 to work for the Institute on a full-time basis and later left the Dominican Order in 1969, recognised that many people had already passed through a metanoia.13 For them, the problem now became how to ‘put this change into effect’.14 In 1966 the Christian Council of South Africa (later renamed the South African Council of Churches) had moved closer to the Christian 168 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

Institute when it elected the South African-born Anglican Bishop of Grahamstown, Bill Burnett, to the post of general secretary, bringing ‘about a close liaison with the CI’, which became a ‘member organisation of the CCSA’ in 1967.15 The Christian Institute was one organisation, together with NUSAS, UCM and the South African Institute of Race Relations, which pointed to the abuses of apartheid and the folly of trusting such a system for the future of the country. Apart from these organisations, a small minority made public protests, drawing attention to the flagrant abuses of human rights that had become commonplace under apartheid. For example, the Anglican priest and Missions to Seamen minister in Cape Town, Reverend Bernard Wrankmore, undertook a widely publicised 67-day fast at a Muslim shrine on Signal Hill, Cape Town, on the anniversary of the death of Imam Hadjee Abdullah Haroun in 1971. Wrankmore demanded that the government appoint an inquiry into the suspicious circumstances of the death of the Imam, who died in 1969 while being held for questioning by the Security Branch, until which time Wrankmore refused to give up his fast.16 Another cleric, Cosmas Desmond, a Catholic priest, conducted research and published a ‘highly disturbing’ exposé of approximately 60 of the government’s ‘resettlement camps’ titled The Discarded People and published by the Christian Institute in 1970. The book was banned and its author served with a particularly severe banning order that restricted him to his house and forbade him any visitors.17 Although critical in their individual stances on apartheid, and challenged by individual protests such as that of Wrankmore and Desmond, as institutions the ecumenical churches (as opposed to the Afrikaans-speaking reformed churches) in South Africa had acquiesced to the state while maintaining a critical rhetorical position. This ambiguous position reached a crucible in early September 1970 when the World Council of Churches announced the first of a series of grants, as part of the ‘Special Fund’ of its Programme to Combat Racism, thus forcing the South African churches to take a definite public stand on the liberation movements and their armed struggle.18 The World Council of Churches’ decision was the result of a long engagement with race as a problem of the twentieth century, which had crystallised at the Fourth Assembly at Uppsala, Sweden, in 1968.19 Baldwin Sjollema, a sociologist from the Netherlands who grew up under Nazi The Radicalisation of the Christian Institute 169 occupation, was closely involved in the process and later recalled that the participants of the Uppsala assembly ‘were confronted with a world in turmoil [and] one of the major issues was racism’.20 Delegates to the assembly recognised the need for urgent action, and called Christians ‘to seek to overcome racism wherever it appears’.21 The international Consultation on Racism in London, from 19 to 24 May 1969, looked to determine a course of action to combat racism, with a view to ‘make a new exploration of the nature, causes and consequences of racism in the light of contemporary conflict situations, the means being used to combat it, and the possibilities of new Christian witness in this area’.22 This gathering consisted of 40 Christians, drawn from the laity and clergy, with the addition of 25 consultants. The Consultation called on the World Council of Churches and its member churches to create an ecumenical programme to combat racism, as well as for it to ‘offer a convincing moral lead in the face of this great and growing crisis of our times’.23 As a result of the deliberations, at its meeting at the University of Kent, Canterbury, in August 1969 the World Council of Churches’ Central Committee set up the Programme to Combat Racism. It also elected to set up the Special Fund to Combat Racism, providing the fund with a total amount of $200 000 drawn from the World Council of Churches’ reserves.24 The Committee made an appeal to its member churches to donate a further $300 000 to the Special Fund, a call that was met with only limited response.25 The staff co-ordinating group conducted research initially in 1970 and drew up three profiles of the humanitarian programmes of FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique, Mozambique), PAIGC (Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau) and the ANC (African National Congress, South Africa), which were in line to receive money from the Special Fund. In September 1970 at its meeting in Arnoldshain, Germany, the Central Committee announced the first of the grants, a division of the $200 000 that would be made to nineteen organisations, which included the liberation movements of southern Africa, through the Special Fund.26 The amounts given to the individual liberation movements were relatively small ($10 000 was allocated to the ANC) and were expressly for humanitarian projects and not for military purposes. Nonetheless, the decision by the World Council of Churches was a 170 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS watershed moment that divided the church worldwide, as it appeared to give tacit support to the use of violence by oppressed peoples to achieve social justice, an ethical question that was deeply divisive for the Christian churches. Within the World Council of Churches itself at the meeting of its Central Committee in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, from 10 to 21 January 1971, there was considerable debate on the question of whether violence could ever be condoned by Christians to achieve social change, a question the assembly was forced to defer on. The final resolution on the Programme to Combat Racism refused to ‘identify itself completely with any political movement’, but noted that violence was ‘in many cases inherent in the maintenance of the status quo’ and refused to ‘pass judgement on those victims of racism who are driven to violence’ to ‘open the way for a new and more just social order’.27 The response to the World Council of Churches’ grants was particularly acute and divisive in South Africa. The predominantly white church leaderships were indignant and moved quickly to condemn the grants and to dissociate themselves from the World Council of Churches’ position, though they stopped short of bowing to government pressure to cut links with the international body. In contrast, the lay black majority was conspicuously quiet, giving a sense of silent support for the grants. Barney Pityana later recalled that the World Council of Churches’ decision caused ‘an emotional tide of reaction’ from the South African churches and white public, as the decision unleashed ‘an avalanche of anger from the white establishment both in the churches and in politics’.28 The day after the World Council of Churches released its statement, on 8 September, the South African Council of Churches met in Johannesburg and issued its own statement dissociating itself from the ‘implied support of violence’. The South African Council also stressed that none of its representatives was present when the World Council of Churches made the decision. Naudé issued a statement to the effect that the Christian Institute rejected the use of violence as a means of bringing about change. Pro Veritate editor Bruckner de Villiers observed the silence of black Christians in response to the grants.29 The editor of the SASO Newsletter remarked that the official church statements made them ‘feel black opinion is regarded as extremely unimportant’ and that the white church leadership ‘who speak on behalf of an overwhelmingly black The Radicalisation of the Christian Institute 171 membership’ needed to ‘find out what the people really think’.30 The Anglican Bishop of Zululand, Alphaeus Zulu, who was serving as a president of the World Council of Churches at the time, was the only church leader to comment publicly on the decision, which he regarded as rash, given that South African churches had not been properly consulted.31 He was prepared to go further and advocated that the South African Churches resign from the World Council of Churches en bloc.32 By 1974, he was prepared to resign from the Council as president, even if South African churches did not follow him.33 Church historian John de Gruchy, who was an active participant in the South African Council of Churches at the time, reflected later on the impact and meaning of the grants on the churches in South Africa. The grants, he observed, constituted a profound test of the ‘fellowship and commitment of the churches’. Recounting one story, De Gruchy recalled a synod where a white pastor spoke against the grants on the grounds that at the time his son was serving with the army on the border, to which a black pastor countered that his nephew was part of a liberation army fighting from the other side of the border. Furthermore, the grants clarified the position of the churches in relation to apartheid for black Christians – in many cases, their participation in synods prevented the withdrawal of their churches from the World Council of Churches – and served as a wake-up call that ‘time for change was running out’.34 The result was a refining process that resulted in ‘a new note of determination’ in the churches.35

The Study Project on Christianity in Apartheid Society: SPRO-CAS 1 In this charged environment, the Christian Institute was more than a year into SPRO-CAS 1, which had been established in 1969. The attempt to put ‘change into effect’ was the main impulse behind SPRO-CAS, but in a sense the genesis of the project lay in the Cottesloe Consultation of 1960. It was the influence of the international ecumenical movement on South Africa that Cottesloe represented, as an alternative model for society and a progressive touchstone with the outside world. Naudé and Bill Burnett initiated a chain of events that would result in SPRO- CAS, when they attended the World Council of Churches’ Conference on Church and Society in Geneva from 12 to 26 July 1966. The Geneva 172 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS conference dwelt specifically on the responsibility of Christians with regard to social and ethical issues and it had significant participation of delegates from Third World countries. Writing later, Burnett observed that the Geneva conference was ‘an attempt at defining the kind of witness required today’, especially with regard to the challenges faced by those in Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and Africa.36 On their return to South Africa, the Christian Institute and the South African Council of Churches jointly hosted a countrywide set of consultations to discuss the Geneva conference. The final assembly, the National Consultation on Church and Society, was held in Johannesburg in February 1968.37 The publication of A Message to the People of South Africa in September 1968 by the South African Council of Churches was the product of the committee formed at the National Consultation and written in conjunction with the Theological Commission of the South African Council of Churches. The main writers of A Message were Anglican chaplain Reverend John Davies, Dr Ben Engelbrecht of the Dutch Reformed Church and Reverend Calvin Cook of the Methodist Church.38 The release of A Message coincided with the breakaway of black students in 1968 to form SASO, a coincidence that speaks to the simultaneity of trajectories that this book explores. A Message was consciously modelled on the Barmen Declaration of the German Confessing Church of 1934, which sought to reassert the Church’s commitment to Christ above the claims of nationalism. A Message condemned the central tenets of apartheid and asserted that Christians were answerable to a higher authority than the state, namely, to Christ. The official summary, among other things, stated that ‘such barriers as race and nationality have no rightful place in the inclusive brotherhood of Christian disciples’.39 A clearer rejection of apartheid at the time was difficult to imagine. The broader significance of the publication of A Message, as Frank Chikane would later observe, was that it signalled a ‘new phase in the life of the SACC and its member churches’, as they had chosen to side with black South Africans and start on a path of confrontation with apartheid.40 Although A Message was primarily a theological statement, it had clear political implications and served as the basis for challenging the theological rationale for apartheid. But while A Message presented a theological critique of apartheid, the The Radicalisation of the Christian Institute 173 question for the white electorate remained about what economic and political system would replace apartheid. The South African Council of Churches and the Christian Institute set up SPRO-CAS 1 in 1969 to address this question. SPRO-CAS 1 comprised six study commissions covering eco- nomics, education, law, politics, sociology and the church and ran for two years.41 Funding from the United Kingdom (22 per cent) and Germany (31 per cent) provided the bulk of the revenue, with the remainder sourced from South Africa (14 per cent) and small contributions from the South African Council of Churches (3 per cent) and Christian Aid (4 per cent).42 Liberal educationist Peter Randall was appointed as director and the project gathered primarily white academic and leading white public opinion on political and economic alternatives to apartheid, but with little black input. As Walshe notes: ‘The black/white member ratios were 5:26 in the Church Commission, 1:20 Economics, 1:14 Education, 1:13 Legal, 1:24 Political and 5:22 in the Social Commission.’43 Introducing SPRO-CAS, the incumbent Pro Veritate editor, Ben Engelbrecht, who took over editing of the periodical from Naudé in October 1966 until January 1970, when De Villiers replaced him, articulated the project’s goal. South Africa needed a ‘radical liberation’ from its ‘ideological bondage’, a ‘shattering of the evil illusion that walls of division between people . . . can preserve and perpetuate peace and harmony, justice and righteousness’.44 Although this seemed improbable, the Christian hope of conversion and redemption could not be abandoned and what applied to the individual could ‘mutatis mutandis, also happen to a political and social structure’. The invitations to join the SPRO-CAS commissions were signed by both Bishop Burnett and Naudé.45 The ambitious first stage started with small beginnings, with ‘an office, a director, a secretary, and warm encouragement’ from the leaders of the sponsoring bodies, Naudé of the Christian Institute and Burnett of the South African Council of Churches. Randall recalled that the programme began without any prior feasibility studies or pilot projects, or even a guarantee of funds: ‘The director literally sat at an empty desk and wondered how to go about things.’46 It was, therefore, very much a ‘venture of faith on the part of a small group of Christians who were convinced that such a project was both desirable and necessary’. Randall had a formidable task on 174 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS his hands to co-ordinate the activities of the six study commissions and to maintain contact with funders, the Christian Institute and the South African Council of Churches. Reading the SPRO-CAS papers reveals a flurry of correspondence between Randall and Naudé, as well as the wide array of public figures that were involved in each of the commissions, including liberals of the older generation, such as Alan Paton and Edgar Brookes, who endorsed the importance of the project. Somewhat unsurprisingly, given its liberal origins and association, the SPRO-CAS study commissions immediately attracted criticism from Biko and members of SASO, who regarded the whole endeavour with deep scepticism. Biko saw any attempt to formulate an ‘alternative’ to apartheid, apart from complete democracy, as doomed to failure because ‘they [were] looking for an alternative acceptable to the white people’.47 Pityana later criticised the SPRO-CAS commissions’ failure to consider ‘the will of the majority of the people of South Africa’ and the oppressed ‘to be a sufficient barometer’ for an alternative social and political order in South Africa, noting the ‘succession of black leaders’ of whom Nelson Mandela and Albert Luthuli were ready examples, who had articulated exactly such alternatives.48 He wondered whether the vision encapsulated in the was not a clear enough statement of the basis of a new society and felt the Charter’s recommendations were overlooked in the search for a political solution acceptable to white South Africa. As much as Pityana’s and Biko’s criticisms were valid, the SPRO-CAS endeavour proved to be a valuable caucusing of what would otherwise have been disparate opinion and thus was as much a radical moment, in the sense of a return to base values, as it proved to be a failure of liberal solutions. In its form and attempt to draw a more representative set of views, including those of black South Africans, SPRO-CAS was completely at odds with the spirit of apartheid. SPRO-CAS would also come to mark the critical change in direction of the Christian Institute and the shockwaves created by Black Consciousness were an important component of this change. In form and approach, SPRO-CAS evoked what Adam Ashforth calls a ‘Grand Tradition’ of study commissions, organised to examine and describe African life and to formulate responses to the ‘Native Question’, in which ‘experts’ and scientific knowledge were marshalled The Radicalisation of the Christian Institute 175 to generate a form of discursive authority that can be interpreted as a form of state power.49 Although not generated by the state (the Carnegie Commission being a closer historical comparison), SPRO- CAS followed a similar approach to that described by Ashforth, where experts were consulted on African life and where change was still considered to be within the control of white politics. Writing in the first SPRO-CAS occasional publication, Anatomy of Apartheid (published in 1970), Randall discounted the possibility of internal revolution because of the efficiency of the police and military apparatus. Given that foreign intervention was improbable as well, Randall argued, completely mistaken as he would later prove to be, that ‘significant change in the near future can only come from within the White group, and more importantly from within the ruling political party’.50 Thus, he pointed with hope to the growing ‘verligte’ movement in the National Party and the trends of urbanisation and prosperity among Afrikaners, which, he suggested, augured well for significant change, though not necessarily in the ‘direction of a shared or common society’. Randall also considered economic factors, but he warned against any ‘facile optimism for early change’ stemming from the economic situation. The (flawed) starting assumption of the SPRO-CAS endeavour, evident in Randall’s discussion, was that whites remained very much the custodians of power and that therefore they were responsible for change. It was this assumption that would be remarkably challenged and altered through Black Consciousness, as would become evident in the conclusions reached by the end of the first phase of SPRO-CAS. The attempt to include such a broad range of views created inevitable problems for Randall. The Economics Commission was especially troublesome, with particular resistance to the inclusion of Rick Turner as a member of a new subcommittee formed in 1970. Dr André Muller wrote to Randall on 16 September 1970 to express concern that the new participants, particularly Turner, ‘should not be regarded as members of the economic commission’. 51 They were, Muller argued, ‘unable to make a useful contribution’ and some of them ‘are extreme leftists’. The economics report as a whole was in danger and could be discredited by the government, based on the composition of the commission. Furthermore, Muller regarded some of their views as ‘contemptible’. He worried that ‘Turner and Fransman 176 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS are [not] Christians – the latter, I understand, is a Jew, and neither seem to share the common Christian ethic of the rest of the commission’. If it happened that ‘one of them should be listed as a communist, our Sprocas will become tainted in the same way as has now happened to the World Council of Churches’, alluding to the furore as a result of the World Council of Churches’ funding decision that had just broken out. As a result of their inclusion, Muller darkly warned, ‘all our efforts would have been in vain, as they would not have any impact’. In another letter in the same month, Rufus Kenney wrote to Randall expressing concern that ‘the thoughts of Herbert Marcuse appear to have made considerable impact on the minds of some members of the sub- committee, and I can hardly imagine our sponsors being enthusiastic over Marcus [sic].’52 The resistance to Turner’s ideas extended beyond his apparent endorsement of Marcuse’s views. One criticism was that rather than escaping liberalism and articulating a radical alternative, Turner had only reasserted core liberal premises in a more extreme form. As one reviewer of Turner’s The Eye of the Needle, ‘R.W.F.’, explained, the ‘characteristic liberal dichotomy’ between ‘the facts’ and transcendental values to which they were compared, persisted in the book.53 The argument was addressed, moreover, to ‘the individual’, who was pressed to make an informed choice, presuming the correct information, which Turner provided, failing which they were presumed to be ‘evil’. Such political argument led ‘directly to that impotent moralising about politics’ for which liberals were ‘so justly disliked’ and radicalism ‘far from presenting an alternative to these central defects of liberalism, is seen carrying them to extremes’. The Stellenbosch academic W.A. de Klerk, a friend of Turner’s old professor, Martin Versfeld of the University of Cape Town, who also served on the SPRO-CAS Social Commission, similarly wrote to Randall and Naudé to express his grave misgivings about the Christian Institute’s support for Turner’s ideas in the form of publishing The Eye of the Needle. As De Klerk pointed out, it was at a moment of real weakness for the Christian Institute, then under investigation by the Schlebusch Commission, and its implied support of Turner’s ‘revolutionary ideas’ (‘revelusionere idees’) compromised the organisation. He argued that the problem with Turner was that he ‘smelt of apartheid’ The Radicalisation of the Christian Institute 177

(‘hy na Apartheid ruik’), as he sought to replace Christian Nationalism with what De Klerk called ‘Christian Marxism’.54 De Klerk wrote in similar terms to Randall, elaborating on why Turner smelt of apartheid and why he felt it so unwise for SPRO-CAS to provide the base from which Turner could make his manifesto for what was in his eyes, ‘simply revolution’.55 In his response to De Klerk, Randall tried to explain how their support for Turner had come about, arguing that Turner’s essay had been valuable ‘in that it helps one to clarify one’s thinking against a radical yardstick’. Rather than being an idiosyncratic product of a lone intellectual, it seemed to Randall ‘that Rick’s book represented an organic outgrowth of the work of Spro-cas and its challenges could not be avoided’.56 SPRO-CAS was ‘probably the only agency in South Africa that would publish the book’ and Randall pointed out that the leaders of the two major political organisations among Indians and Coloureds had been among the signatories of the book, indicating acceptance of its main ideas among these black communities and therefore justifying its importance. De Klerk was not convinced. He made his critique of The Eye of the Needle public and indeed expanded on his reservations in a review in the Cape Times in June 1972. Like the reviewer ‘R.W.F.’, De Klerk expressed unease with the utopianism that inspired the book, but on the basis that it would ‘sooner or later’ become ‘another of the procrustean beds’ of ideology that had plagued recent history.57 Rather than being an alternative to apartheid, De Klerk objected that Turner’s participatory democracy idea was its ‘blood brother’, another form of ‘godly politics’ premised on the ‘ “massive and rapid” reconstruction of society’. Turner responded to De Klerk’s combative review in a letter to the editor, pointing out that De Klerk had failed to properly engage with his arguments for social change, one key element of which had been the need for the decentralisation of power, rather than its consolidation and abuse, which De Klerk had suggested was his aim. De Klerk had instead appealed to bad Utopian thinking by concluding his article with a call for the need to organise societies ‘in a charitable, reasonable, practical, livable [sic] way’,58 but not specifying how this would ever be achieved.59 For Turner, careful planning and thinking about the future was critical, as he concluded, ‘we have to defeat apartheid by thinking systematically better, rather than by not thinking at all’.60 Randall also 178 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS jumped to defend the book and in a letter to the editor of the Cape Times, he also pointed out De Klerk’s failure to offer firm counter- arguments to Turner’s proposals and reiterated the importance of the book, which had lifted ‘the dreary current debate amongst whites . . . to a new level of awareness’.61 Randall’s public defence of Turner was a measure of how far the SPRO-CAS organisers had moved in their assessment of South Africa’s situation and cure. The book did have a more receptive audience than De Klerk though. One young man, John Rossouw, writing from Johannesburg, described to Turner how he had experienced the sensation of ‘having dropped through the floor of the socio-economic and political world in which I have grown up’, after reading Turner’s article ‘The Relevance of Contemporary Radical Thought’.62 After reading The Eye of the Needle a year later, he felt that his ‘awareness of myself and those other people with whom I coinhabit [sic] this country have been sponged down with detergent’. Such strong metaphors as ‘dropping through the floor’ and being ‘sponged with detergent’ implied both a decentring of grand narratives and a clearing of confusion and nonsense. The metaphors conveyed the emotional impact of Turner’s work on his white readers, where the processes of socialisation they had been exposed to were laid open and convincingly critiqued. It surely represented the experience of many other young white people, to whom the book’s moral argument was directed. By 25 September 1972, Randall wrote to Turner of ‘a very encouraging demand’ for The Eye of the Needle, sales of a total of 2 804 copies, and was confident enough to suggest a second edition that could be published in mid-1973, an offer that was not realised, to my knowledge.63 This success was reflective of wider interest in the output of the SPRO-CAS commissions. Ivor Shapiro, a staff worker with SPRO-CAS, reflected after the final report was released that SPRO-CAS had ‘produced 20 paperback books in well under three years – each of them a significant and readable contribution to South African non-fiction – and by 10 May a total of almost 58 000 copies has been distributed’.64 By 22 November 1973, Shapiro and Nikki Westcott reported that 70 000 books had been distributed, ‘making Sprocas probably the most prolific South African publishing house, but also one of the most successful’ and that work would be continued after January 1974 by Ravan Press.65 The Radicalisation of the Christian Institute 179

Despite the publication achievement there was much criticism, this time from those on the left. For critics of apartheid, the SPRO- CAS reports had failed to go far enough in condemning the system. In a review in the Journal of Southern African Studies, University of the Witwatersrand political scientist Alf Stadler criticised the overall tone of the reports as ‘meliorist’, in this context implying small reforms rather than the fundamental change radicals called for, and observed that ‘much of its published work was a debate involving impossibly diverse groups’.66 Revealing the changes that South African scholarship had experienced in the 1970s as part of the so-called liberal-radical debate, Stadler pointed to the particular failure to recognise racism as ‘an integral part of South African capitalism’ and noted the conservative bias of the majority of SPRO-CAS committee members.67 Trevor Bell, an academic based at Rhodes University and one of the more radical participants who had been involved in the deliberations, in the end chose to dissociate himself from the final economics report. As he explained to Randall, after studying the report ‘extremely carefully’, he had decided that he could not subscribe to its conclusions, particularly because ‘the case for substantial social change in South Africa is not argued as forcefully as it could be, and that the report’s ability to influence public opinion in South Africa . . . is thus impaired in several ways’.68 He observed that the commission’s conclusions did not deal adequately with trade unions and that the ‘political difficulties’ the report raised were inadequately dealt with, with the result that the fall- back appeal on ‘ “Christians [whose] faith impels them to be on the side of the under-dog” ’ was inadequate and rested on a weak analysis and the lack of a practical solution. The SPRO-CAS members on the Politics Commission had toyed with the idea of South Africa as a ‘plural society’ so as to account for its diversity and to sanction, in a sense, its deep cleavages. Such ideas seemed to have influenced at least some. An address given by Chris Mzoneli, ‘Black Theology in a Plural Society’, brought the simultaneous intellectual developments together of Black Theology and the new political approach of pluralism. Acknowledging his use of the concept ‘plural’ to Dr Lawrie Schlemmer’s contribution to the SPRO-CAS publication Anatomy of Apartheid (1970), it was, Mzoneli noted, ‘a sociological term to describe the diversity of our society – in terms of race, nationalism, culture and tribalism’.69 180 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

The attraction of pluralism was not surprising, given the broader liberal framework of many SPRO-CAS commission members. From the late 1960s, sociologists Leo Kuper, M.G. Smith and Pierre van den Berghe bolstered the idea of pluralism in several publications, such as Kuper and Smith’s Pluralism in Africa (1969) and Van den Berghe’s South Africa: A Case Study in Conflict (1965) and Race and Racism (1967). The concept easily accommodated the notion of distinct ethnic groups, although the concept of ethnicity was widely confused with race in popular and academic usage. The development of critical sociology and its emphasis on economic relations and class challenged this focus, evidenced in some of the critiques of the SPRO-CAS commissions’ conclusions. The social scientist Bernard Magubane, who had been Kuper’s student at the University of Natal in the early 1960s, challenged pluralism in 1969 for its ‘lack of historical dimension and for neglecting the social and economic basis of social cleavage in society’.70 A few years later, Martin Legassick charged that class was the critical element lacking in the ‘pluralist perspective’.71 Young scholars based at London, Oxford and Sussex universities, including the exiled Stanley Trapido and the Canadian radical scholar F.A. Johnstone, and 1960s’ NUSAS activist and scholar Legassick, mounted the revisionist challenge. Soon, ‘dog-eared copies of papers given at Oxford, Sussex or London’ secretly circulated in ‘Johannesburg and Durban’ and a ‘photocopy culture’ developed ‘in tandem’ with political developments in South Africa.72 Exiled South African Communist Party member Harold Wolpe was also a particularly important influence on thinking within the country, rivalling even Turner’s influence on a new generation of students.73 Randall and SPRO-CAS members finally opted to distance themselves from a pluralist conception of South African society because of its ambiguity with regard to the crucial question of political power. After closely considering the idea, the Political Commission’s report issued in 1973 identified a ‘fundamental distinction between two possible courses of action in the transition towards a multi-racial South Africa: on the one hand, the liberal conception of the Common Society, on the other, the “Plural States” option’.74 The latter was implicitly rejected as a suspected guise for a refinement of domination, rather than a genuine alternative. The Radicalisation of the Christian Institute 181

If there was disparagement of the final SPRO-CAS report from the political left, conservative members were also critical. Political scientist Denis Worrall at the University of the Witwatersrand strongly defended ‘the plural states’ option as he judged the approach to protect liberal democratic values and ‘the only pragmatic means of influencing the government in a positive direction’.75 Worrall showed his true colours when he joined the National Party in 1974, and he later supported P.W. Botha’s reforms in the 1980s. SPRO-CAS proved to have a more significant impact on the Christian Institute than the South African Council of Churches. This was because a close working relationship developed among staff members of the two organisations and the result of what Randall saw as the ‘greater flexibility and adaptability of the CI’s structures and its generally more open and receptive style’.76 Although the conclusions of the SPRO-CAS 1 reports were far from unanimous and clear, the form of the second stage of the project indicated that something had shifted within the Christian Institute during SPRO-CAS 1. One achievement of the first phase of SPRO-CAS was to sensitise the Christian Institute to new currents of thought in the black community, particularly Black Consciousness.

Practical initiatives: The Special Project for Christian Action in Society (SPRO-CAS 2) Introducing the second phases of SPRO-CAS in Pro Veritate, it was admitted that the ‘present South African society is deeply divided’ and that ‘the needs of the black community and the white community are not the same’.77 The aim of the second phase of SPRO-CAS was to lend support to black initiative and to assist whites with their responses to these initiatives.78 Thus SPRO-CAS 2 was launched in March 1972 as the Black Community Programmes under the directorship of Bennie Khoapa, with a separate White Conscientisation Programme under Horst Kleinschmidt, with the intention that the project continue for a further two years. The structure and naming of the SPRO-CAS 2 projects were significant – indicating an acknowledgement of the need for black independence and the need for an equivalent to Black Consciousness to change the mentality of white South Africans. The difference in SPRO-CAS 2 in its form and its logic from its predecessor 182 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS showed the degree to which the Christian Institute had changed. It now endorsed an approach where the oppressed should take the initiative. As Walshe argues, as the Institute grew more committed to ‘give power to others’ and grew more willing to accept the leadership and insights of the Black Consciousness Movement, it was able to discover a new role and new life.79 An information sheet written to introduce SPRO-CAS 2, explained that its logic was ‘to support black initiative, and to work with whites in responding creatively to black initiative’.80 Indicating the success of the argument of Black Consciousness, the writer(s) explained that the approach was not a rejection of non-racialism, but a recognition that ‘problems which people [from different races] face’ were ‘basically different’. As noted at the start of this chapter, SPRO-CAS 2 provided funding to Biko and Khoapa to establish the BCP. Although at its second General Students’ Council SASO had passed the motion that discouraged contact with multiracial groups, in practice this principle was applied selectively. SASO’s executive council meeting in Edendale unanimously passed a motion that specified that the BCP should be supported for the reason that it operated in reality independently of SPRO-CAS 2 and that ‘interaction with multiracial bodies’ was ‘not normal practice with SASO’, but did not support a motion that the Black Worker’s Project ‘should be independent of white organisation and in particular Spro-cas 2’.81 The funding from SPRO-CAS 2 would allow Biko to create a hub of development in King William’s Town, which made his banning in 1973 something of a boon for the area. The Eastern Cape and King William’s Town became a centre for Black Consciousness activists with Biko’s banning, where the emphasis shifted from critique to action, as the student-activists matured and sought new roles beyond student politics. As in Durban, Biko established wide friendships, which included relationships with sympathetic whites. Donald Woods, editor of the Daily Dispatch, described his relationship with Biko as a ‘deep friendship’ ‘that went beyond considerations’, ‘a personal relationship among people drawn to each other as compatible human beings’.82 Biko converted Woods to the ideas of Black Consciousness and there was an Eastern Cape ‘moment’ as well, where activists grouped around Biko in King William’s Town engaged in community development programmes and sought to resist increasing state repression.83 When The Radicalisation of the Christian Institute 183

Biko was banned and restricted to the Eastern Cape, his own role changed from student organiser and SASO publications officer in Durban to that of community development. Woods was profoundly influenced by Biko personally and also claims to have changed some of Biko’s political views in their discussions.84 David Russell, like Aelred Stubbs a member of the Community of the Resurrection, also became a later confidant of Biko’s. Russell was South African born, the son of a United Party Member of Parliament, who later left the party to help in founding the Progressive Party in 1959.85 Educated first at Bishops Diocesan College, Russell studied at the University of Cape Town and read history at Oxford University. He entered the Community of the Resurrection’s Mirfield Seminary in Yorkshire while in England, where he was strongly influenced by the writings of Gandhi and the French contemplative Charles de Foucauld, before he returned to South Africa with the Community of the Resurrection. The second wing of SPRO-CAS 2 was the White Conscientisation Programme, led by Horst Kleinschmidt. As an activist from a working- class, German Namibian background, Kleinschmidt had been recruited to NUSAS while a student at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in the 1960s. He recalled the logic of the endeavour, which signalled a radical change of direction. He went so far as to introduce the White Conscientisation Programme by quoting the Black Power leader Stokely Carmichael. Kleinschmidt introduced the logic that ‘if the white man wants to go help, he must go home and convert his own people’.86 The Christian Institute used what was available to them, ‘we used church structures to do our work’. The programme, however, was a failure; Kleinschmidt remembered it as ‘uphill, terribly hard to get people to do things’, understanding that ‘political education is only education if it leads to action’. Kleinschmidt equated some of this failure to the impotency of the middle class, as he observed: ‘People don’t play a role in middle classes.’ His understanding of the role of the Christian Institute was that ‘we undermined the chattering class’, presumably an allusion to the white, educated middle class. From this recollection, it is apparent how deeply the thinking of Black Consciousness had influenced the leadership of SPRO-CAS, with Kleinschmidt quoting Black Panther leader Carmichael, whose ideas had impacted on SASO. It is also apparent how the church 184 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS provided the vehicle to attempt the ‘political education’ of the white middle class, even if this was not successful. Indicating the easy slide of the Christian Institute from a liberal Christian think tank to illegality under apartheid, Kleinschmidt remembered how they circumvented government restrictions, as well as their support for banned persons, particularly Cosmas Desmond:

In Jorissen Street [Johannesburg] our offices were opposite Dunwell House, the SACC had their offices there. There were locked cupboards left behind, where we locked the banned books and took advantage of that. When we came to Jo’burg we stayed with Cosmas Desmond, there was the question if this was legal or not . . . We smuggled him out of the house in the back seat of the car and he would emerge to preach at a service in Parktown St Georges. The priest would allow us access but would not participate . . .87

Kleinschmidt’s recollections also indicate the connectedness between different organisations and individuals, noting the close proximity of the Christian Institute offices to Dunwell House, the headquarters of the South African Council of Churches. His support for Desmond similarly evokes the sense of a disparate group of individuals united by their common opposition to apartheid. The second stage of SPRO-CAS opened up new spaces within which black activists could be employed. In Johannesburg, SASO activists, like the white activists represented by Kleinschmidt, made use of the city space and offices in Braamfontein as their organisational base. Mosibudi Mangena was a Sotho-speaking student at the University of Zululand, Ngoye, who became a member of SASO and later national organiser of the Black People’s Convention (BPC). He was on the Student Representative Council at Ngoye while Mthuli ka Shezi was president, ‘one of the first martyrs of the BCM’.88 Mangena was recruited to the SASO cause by University of Natal Black Section students who came to visit the campus, among them Charles Sibisi and Biko. As a member of the BPC national executive committee, Mangena was present at the first meeting on 2 January 1972. The organisation had meagre resources and was forced to share the UCM offices at The Radicalisation of the Christian Institute 185

Dunswell House in Jorissen Street. The UCM leaders were pleased that the organisation could be ‘benevolent and gracious on its death bed’ and Mangena reflects that ‘by using the offices and other facilities of the dying UCM, we seemed to be rising from their ashes’.89 In a similar way to the area around Beatrice Street in Durban, Mangena describes the way in which Braamfontein facilitated contact and discussion among activists. Chris Mokoditoa and Mokgethi Motlhabi, leaders of the UCM Black Theology Project, hosted the BPC in the ‘first four months of 1972 in the offices of the UCM’.90 This move brought Mangena and the BPC staff into close contact with the other activists and organisations. Evoking the rich constellation of organisations that had their offices in Braamfontein, Mangena recalls that ‘opposite the street in Pharmacy House was the SASO Transvaal regional office, the South African Council of Churches, AICA and the Christian Institute’. There was also the staff of the Black Workers’ Project, who ‘operated from Pharmacy House’ and this allowed ‘consultations and interactions among activists’ to be ‘easy and frequent’. Mangena was thus easily able to ‘go over the road and compare notes with Ranwedzi [Nengwekhulu] who, like me, was in the habit of trotting all over the country organising branches and sorting out problems at local levels’.91 Mangena’s recollections vividly capture the way in which the Johannesburg city space facilitated contacts between activists and organisations. It indicates that in Johannesburg, SASO and the BPC formed alongside the Christian Institute and South African Council of Churches, a nexus of organisations committed to social change, albeit competing notions of change that sometimes created deep tensions. The example of the BCP who took over the premises and facilities of the UCM is illustrative of the facilitative nature of the relationship. Mirroring the role of Durban, according to SASO activist, Sipho Buthelezi, metropolitan Johannesburg brought black students together, becoming ‘the melting pot of national student politics’, as students from the country’s economic centre dominated the national student scene.92 Both Buthelezi’s and Mangena’s stay in Johannesburg, however, was short-lived, as the police raided the BPC offices in June 1973. They were both later tried and convicted on the purported grounds of recruiting students ‘for military training’.93 186 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

As well as the facilitation of SPRO-CAS, the church more broadly played a role. In an interview, Bobby Marie, a Durban-based trade unionist who grew up in Meerbank, an Indian suburb of Durban, and had been mentored by Turner, referred to the importance of Archbishop Denis Hurley and other Christian leaders as ‘big trees that provided the space’ and under whose protection and shade activists could find space to operate.94 He mentioned Paddy Kearney as another facilitator whose role was indirect, but who Marie described as allowing ‘people to run wild . . . Those older leaders opened the space for us. The church provided space, money and protection.’ Kearney had worked as a junior lecturer in the Department of Education at the University of Natal in Durban from 1972.95 Archbishop Hurley and Kearney later established Diakonia in 1976, an ecumenical organisation that worked to prevent families’ relocation, as well as with trade unions, and set up ‘community advice offices’ to provide legal and administrative assistance to those who needed it.96 SPRO-CAS 2 also provided employment for white activists who had come from NUSAS, which also threw up tensions, as it intersected with NUSAS’s own ‘outwards movement’ and its increasing emphasis on labour and trade unions. In Cape Town, Neville Curtis, the NUSAS past president who had been one of the participants in the Abe Bailey conference in 1971, was made the Cape Town co-ordinator of the SPRO-CAS 2 projects in April 1972. Randall’s close work with the Christian Institute in Johannesburg was given as an example to Curtis of how best to operate. In a letter of 28 March 1972 to Curtis, Randall wrote that the Christian Institute was ‘already heavily involved in Spro- cas programs, at all sorts of levels’ and Randall hoped that Curtis would ‘establish similar working relationships with CI staff, board of management and, increasingly, membership, as we have evolved in Johannesburg’.97 This close working relationship appeared to evolve in the Cape as well, as letters and reports of SPRO-CAS organisers to the Western Cape Council of Churches show.98 James Cochrane and Walshe remark how ‘the robust political activism of the Christian Institute’s Cape Town staff ’ could be equated with ‘the new mind of SPRO-CAS II’.99 Although a good working relationship did seem to evolve in Cape Town, Curtis was at odds with Randall and the Christian Institute as a whole from the start. The correspondence between the The Radicalisation of the Christian Institute 187 two men reveals a personality clash, with Curtis’s reports to Randall laced with sarcasm. This tension was informed by Curtis’s unhappiness with the Christian Institute and its culture, and the difficulty posed by directing the activities of the Cape Town branch from Johannesburg, over 1 200 kilometres away. For instance, Curtis wrote to Randall on 24 March 1972, expressing his ‘grave reservations about CI as a whole’, particularly its ‘decision making process’.100 Curtis concluded his letter with the following parting shot: ‘If from your lofty perch in JHB [sic] you could keep this humble burecrat [sic] informed of the workings of the great this would be appreciated’ and signed himself ‘Your Faithful Organiser’. This tension was exacerbated by Curtis’s assumption that SPRO-CAS 2 could complement the activities of the Cape Town Wages Commission. When Curtis approached Randall with the idea that SPRO-CAS 2 should support a student conference on labour, he was firmly turned down. When Randall was informed by another source that SPRO-CAS 2 was indeed a sponsor of the conference, he angrily wrote to Curtis and used the perceived indiscretion of Curtis as an opportunity to terminate his contract and rid himself of someone who had evidently become a thorn in his side. John Rees of the South African Council of Churches and Naudé lent Randall their support for the decision.101 All this activity unsurprisingly garnered the attention of the state. By January 1974, Randall was under so much pressure that he would observe in a letter the difficulty of working, that he did ‘nothing but go back and forth to Pretoria, consult lawyers, speak to [Special Branch] men’. He concluded his letter with a tone of tired resignation, observing that this web of enforced activity was perhaps ‘the intention’.102

‘A hungry tramp’: Assessing the SPRO-CAS projects In the wake of SPRO-CAS 1 and 2, in a short article published in 1974, the theologian Manas Buthelezi assessed the significance of the Christian Institute for blacks. He recognised, firstly, the ambivalence of blacks towards the Christian Institute as a white-dominated, multiracial organisation and the hopelessness of its strategy of goodwill because of the intransigence of white South African society. Buthelezi went so far as to characterise the Christian Institute as a ‘hungry tramp’ who tried to retrieve the food crumbs of ‘certain discarded Christian 188 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS values from the dirt bin of the South African way of life’.103 Buthelezi qualified this barb when he went on to emphasise that the real power of the Christian Institute was in ‘witnessing and suffering’. Through SPRO-CAS, the Christian Institute had taken practical steps to show its commitment to political change. The government’s proscription through bannings and arrests, under the direction of the Schlebusch Commission’s interim reports, was the Christian Institute’s proper contribution to a theology that transcended words and instead was embodied in lived experience – namely ‘the theology of the cross’. When ‘the ministry of words has lost its efficacy, prophets are called upon to communicate the saving message through the essence of their lives’.104 It was in this physical suffering that the Christian Institute held significance for Buthelezi, ‘it is the power of the theology of the cross the Christian Institute is now living’. It was this theology that was readily understood because blacks, according to Buthelezi, ‘have always lived it, theology of power beyond words’. Buthelezi’s emphasis on the way of the cross equated to the sacrifice that white South Africans would be required to make in personal comfort and wealth in order to achieve greater social equality in the country. The ‘theology of the cross’ provided a way to acknowledge and respond to the Black Consciousness critique that for black people to be brought up necessarily entailed some whites ‘coming down’.105 Buthelezi was a leading exponent of Black Theology in South Africa.106 He had been appointed as regional director of the Christian Institute for Natal in the middle of 1973. Jane Phakathi was also appointed as regional director for the Transvaal and . These appointments were the first signs of the Christian Institute’s attempts to adjust to a new context that acknowledged the need for black and female leadership.107 Buthelezi was a figure with extensive contacts in the Christian church in South Africa. Trained as a Lutheran minister, he had completed a Master’s Degree at Yale University Divinity School and a Ph.D. at Drew University in 1968. On his return to South Africa, in the same year, he had been minister at Ekutuleni Church in Melmoth, a lecturer at the Lutheran Theological College at Mapumulo until 1970 and minister again at the Edendale Lutheran Church, until 1971.108 It was Buthelezi’s theological work, however, that ‘began to turn the world of the churches upside down’. 109 In a The Radicalisation of the Christian Institute 189 characteristic Black Consciousness strategy, he sought to invert the power relationship, arguing that it was the duty of black Christians to evangelise whites. Although Black Consciousness had reclaimed the political role of blacks in society, black Christians now needed to take the initiative of evangelism within the churches to save whites from the apostasy of racism. The churches were to become mission stations of a different order – missions rather reaching out to white South Africa. This change would aid the dawning realisation of the faults of the multiracialism the Christian Institute had espoused from its foundation and through the course of the 1960s. Black Theology, as espoused by Buthelezi, provided more importantly a language of protest for black clergy to express long-held frustrations with their churches. As the theologian George Mukuka notes of the black Catholic clergy, they ‘started questioning the hierarchy of their own church long before Black Consciousness was formally launched in South Africa in the late 1960s’.110 But, ‘with the launching of the Black Consciousness Movement . . . from 1969 onwards Black Catholic priests adhered to it mutatis mutandis’. Mukuka goes on to note that the seminary at St Peter’s, Hammanskraal, 40 kilometres north of Pretoria, played a ‘vital role’, both for the Catholic Church and for the response to Black Consciousness, particularly with the formation of St Peter’s Old Boys Association in 1966, which saw black priests take a much stronger critical stand against the racism they experienced at the hands of the Catholic Church.111 It was the impact of Black Consciousness that enabled black priests to again begin to ‘question authority and try to enforce change’. In their challenge to authority structures of the church, the lecturers at St Peter’s, particularly Oswin Magrath who had been rector of the college from 1957,112 played a significant role, as well as individuals such as Lebamang Sebidi, Buti Tlhagale, Elias Monyai and Ernest Baartman.113 This new assertive black leadership was to have a marked impact on the Catholic Church. There were wider signs of the influence of Black Consciousness on the established churches and the success of an assertive black leadership inspired by its ideas. The Catholic Bishop’s Conference circulated a discussion document in early 1974, which Cardinal Owen McCann commended to the laity and South Africa as a whole: ‘This year we are pledging ourselves to Reconciliation, both between God 190 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS and man, and between all men.’114 For such reconciliation to be possible, it was essential that there be mutual understanding and McCann and the Conference recommended that the articles it enclosed be studied, so as to discover the sources of renewed social disquiet. Prominent in the collection of the three articles was a concise and clearly argued piece by the auxiliary Bishop of Johannesburg, Peter Butelezi, which showed that Black Consciousness sought to recover the dignity of the oppressed. In a possible allusion to the ‘human rights revolution’ described by Samuel Moyn,115 Butelezi affirmed that blacks were, according to the social teaching of the Church, possessors of ‘human rights . . . built into man by God’.116 Citizenship was a right for which Black Consciousness strove, Butelezi observed, the fulfilment of which could ‘serve God’. In its defence of the most maligned and abused section of society, Black Consciousness in fact defended ‘all humanity’ and only worked ‘in separation to re-establish those who have been disinherited’.117 Along with Butelezi’s discussion piece, a statement by the Catholic trade union, the Young Christian Workers, cautioned that the Church needed to ‘welcome and inspire the phenomenon of Black Consciousness’, if it wished to retain the loyalty of black people.118 The Church could only credibly claim to defend human rights if it rose above the ‘present socio-political situation’ and provided a ‘model of alternative life styles [sic]’. This ‘dilemma’ was part of ‘the continual choice between Jesus Christ and Mammon, the accepted social standards of the world around us or the new ones of the Cross and Resurrection’. Such language, which fused core Christian symbols with the political context, cannot be understood outside of the preceding years of theological ferment created by Black Theology and Black Consciousness. Its effect was to draw a direct imperative from the Christian faith to oppose the apartheid system and to see the ways in which apartheid negated the humanity of black South Africans. In 1974, the South African Council of Churches, with a stronger black caucus than ever before, passed a historic motion calling on its member churches to support conscientious objection, whereby young white men conscripted to the army refused armed service. The country’s armed involvement, a low-intensity war with the liberation The Radicalisation of the Christian Institute 191 movements in South Africa and in neighbouring countries, was not a ‘just war’ and it was therefore consistent with Christian doctrine that believers should become conscientious objectors. The Council further commended the courage of those who had already been jailed for their witness against the country’s unjust laws.119 The South African Council of Churches’ motion evoked a strongly worded response from Prime Minister B.J. Vorster, who felt that the statement was calculated to bring about a confrontation with the state and ominously warned that ‘those who play with fire in this way must consider very thoroughly before they burn their fingers irrevocably’. There were wider signs that other progressive groups had reached a similar Rubicon. A case in point was the National Catholic Federation of Students (NCFS). The NCFS conference at Stutterheim from 30 June to 6 July 1975 had produced ‘the most radical statements and thinking of any Christian student organisation’.120 The conference theme of ‘Liberation’ was led by the NCFS chaplain, Albert Nolan. Nolan was a fourth-generation South African, born in Cape Town in 1934. Influenced by the writings of the Christian contemplative Thomas Merton, Nolan joined the Dominican Order in 1954 and left South Africa to pursue his doctoral studies in Rome. On his return, he taught theology at the University of Stellenbosch in the 1960s. The 1975 conference to which he spoke attracted 130 participants from campuses across South Africa. The conference addressed the compatibility of the capitalist system with Christianity, ‘conscientization’ and women’s liberation. The conference to which Nolan spoke specifically dwelt on the theme of ‘Christ as liberator in his historical context’. Nolan’s theology considered Jesus as one who ‘challenged the rich to identify in solidarity with the poor’. He thus provided ‘a spirituality of solidarity that resonated with white Catholics seeking a new, progressive direction’.121 As Nolan explained, solidarity with the poor, summarised in the catchphrase, ‘the option for the poor’, entailed ‘an uncompromising and unequivocal taking of sides in a situation of structural conflict’.122 The conference issued a resolution that followed the Christian Institute’s move to condemn capitalism as the economic base of apartheid South Africa, as its values were seen to be ‘in conflict with the Kingdom of God’.123 The conference further protested against the findings of the Schlebusch Commission 192 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS on the Christian Institute and the NCFS pledged continued financial assistance to the Institute. Nolan’s embrace of the ‘option for the poor’ and the NCFS’s enthusiastic espousal of a theology of liberation have been read alongside the rejection by Black Consciousness activists of white liberals as meaningful political actors in South Africa in the 1970s.124 As Anthony Egan notes, Nolan’s main challenge had been ‘to help the organisation renew itself after the departure of its black members’. The response of Nolan, Egan observes, was ‘to embrace and adapt Latin American liberation theology’.125 In this sense, it is possible to trace the emergence of Nolan’s theology in the shockwaves created by Black Consciousness, another intellectual response that added to the rich landscape the Movement had helped so fundamentally to challenge.

Conclusions The Christian Institute provided a vital institutional network, aligned closely with the South African Council of Churches, which provided a protected space for activists and which developed a particular sensitivity to the arguments of Black Consciousness. In this process SPRO-CAS provided a valuable initiative, which, while futile in its overall aim to find an alternative to apartheid acceptable to the white electorate, did provide the impetus for new ideas and a tabling of political alternatives that shaped wider debates and brought together progressive opinion in a way that would not have happened otherwise. Indeed, in its very form, as a national caucusing of leaders and ideas, it was a project antithetical to apartheid and separate development. Turner’s critic, ‘R.W.F’, had been accurate in one sense – the refinement of the moral appeal, central to liberal politics, facilitated the radical political engagement with Black Consciousness in the early 1970s, especially helped by the backing and institutional support of the churches. The ecumenical ethos of the Christian Institute was a facilitative approach that brought people together, even where differences were present and tensions ensued. This ecumenism proved problematic, indicated by the dissensions within SPRO-CAS 1 and the critical reception of its reports by the academic community and activists. In its endeavours to be true to a prophetic faith, the Christian Institute came to take The Radicalisation of the Christian Institute 193 a much more radical stance, reinforced by the challenge of Black Consciousness, which brought them increasingly into opposition with the state. Placed under house arrest from 1973 onwards, Naudé had responded to Biko’s challenge that the political situation in South Africa required him to choose sides. The shockwaves of Black Consciousness effectively changed the course of the Christian Institute, radicalising it and pushing its leadership to take a stronger stand against apartheid and to critically engage with the essential class structure of South African society.

Notes . 1 ‘SPRO-CAS 2 is an Action Programme’, 20 September 1972, WHP A835/B11 I, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand. 2. P. Walshe, Church versus State in South Africa: The Case of the Christian Institute (London: C. Hurst and Co., 1983), 134. 3. This chapter also draws on J. Cochrane, ‘Agapé: Theo Kotze and the Cape Office of the Christian Institute’, Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 118 (March 2004): 53–68. 4. Walshe, Church versus State, 158. 5. Walshe, Church versus State, 135. 6. C. Ryan, Beyers Naudé: Pilgrimage of Faith (Cape Town: David Philip, 1990), 20. 7. R. Elphick and R. Davenport, eds. Christianity in South Africa: A Political, Social and Cultural History (Cape Town: David Philip, 1997), 34, 328. 8. Ryan, Beyers Naudé, 22. 9. See, in particular, Ryan, Beyers Naudé. 10. C. Mayson, interview, in Ryan, Beyers Naudé, 124. 11. Ryan, Beyers Naudé, 147. 12. H. Küng, On Being a Christian (London: Collins, 1977), 191. Cited in K-N. Oh, ‘Sagehood and Metanoia: The Confucian-Christian Encounter in Korea’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 61, no. 2 (1993): 314. 13. P. Denis, The Dominican Friars in Southern Africa: A Social History, 1557–1990 (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 265. 14. M. Collier, ‘Apologia Pro Vita Nostra’, Pro Veritate 8, no. 1 (May 1969): 4. http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/pvmay69. 15. D. Thomas, Christ Divided: Liberalism, Ecumenism, and Race in South Africa (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2002), 167–8. 194 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

16. ‘Country without a Conscience’, Pro Veritate 10, no. 6 (October 1971): 17. http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/pvoct71. 17. M. Horrell, D. Horner and J. Kane-Berman, A Survey of Race Relations in South Africa: 1971 (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1972), 50. 18. This discussion draws from my article ‘Ecumenism and the Global Anti- apartheid Struggle: The World Council of Churches’ Special Fund in South Africa and Botswana, 1970–75’, Historia 62, no. 2 (November 2017): 87– 111. 19. For example, Joseph Oldham, a Scottish missionary to India who was prominent in the first international missionary councils, which were integral to the genesis of the ecumenical movement, penned a Christian critique of scientific racism, Christianity and the Race Problem (New York, George H. Doran Co., 1924). 20. B. Sjollema, Never Bow to Racism: A Personal Account of the Ecumenical Struggle (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2015), xi. 21. Cited in World Council of Churches, Minutes and Reports, 23rd Meeting, University of Kent, Canterbury, 12–22 August 1969 (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1969), 270. 22. World Council of Churches, Minutes and Reports August 1969, 270. 23. World Council of Churches, Minutes and Reports August 1969, 271. 24. World Council of Churches Central Committee, Minutes and Reports of 24th Meeting (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1971), 241. 25. World Council of Churches Central Committee, Minutes and Reports of 24th Meeting, 242. 26. World Council of Churches Central Committee, Minutes and Reports of 24th Meeting, 241. 27. World Council of Churches Central Committee, Minutes and Reports of 24th Meeting, 55. 28. Cited in B. Pityana, ‘Tumultuous Response: The Voices of the South African Churches’, in A Long Struggle: The Involvement of the World Council of Churches in South Africa, ed. P. Webb (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1994), 89. 29. W.B. de Villiers, ‘Editorial’, Pro Veritate 9, no. 6 (October 1970): 2. http:// disa.ukzn.ac.za/pvoct70. 30. SASO Newsletter (September 1970): 5. http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/sasep70. 31. Walshe, Church versus State, 115. 32. Letter from A.H. Zulu to Rt. Revd. T.G.V. Inman, 1 March 1974, AB 1291/A WCC Central Committee 1973, Church of the Province of South Africa Papers, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand. The Radicalisation of the Christian Institute 195

33. Letter from A.H. Zulu to Rt. Revd. T.G.V. Inman. 34. J. de Gruchy, The Church Struggle in South Africa, 2nd edition (Cape Town: David Philip, 1986), 136–7. 35. De Gruchy, Church Struggle in South Africa, 138. 36. B. Burnett, ‘Questions and Answers about the World Council of Churches and Communism’, Pro Veritate 6, no. 5 (September 1967): 13. http://disa. ukzn.ac.za/pvsep67. 37. Walshe, Church versus State, 58. 38. Walshe, Church versus State, 60–1. 39. ‘A Message to the People of South Africa: Authorised Summary’, September 1968. http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/a-message-to-the-people-of- south-africa-authorised-summary%2C-1968. 40. F. Chikane, ‘A Critical Examination of the Theology and Praxis of the SACC, 1968–1988’, Master’s thesis, University of Natal, 1992, 58. 41. P. Randall, ed., Anatomy of Apartheid: SPRO-CAS Occasional Publication No. 1 (Johannesburg: SPRO-CAS, 1970), 5. 42. Spro-cas Revenue and Expenditure Account, 1/2/69 – 31/5/69, WHP A835/Aa, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand. 43. Walshe, Church versus State, 102. 44. B. Engelbrecht, ‘ “SPRO-CAS” – An Essential Project’, Pro Veritate 8, no. 4 (August 1969): 3. http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/pvaug69. 45. Economics Commission: General Correspondence 1969–1972, WHP A835/Ad3 iv–v, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand. 46. P. Randall, ‘SPRO-CAS Revisited: The Christian Contribution to the Political Debate’, in Resistance and Hope: South African Essays in Honour of Beyers Naudé, ed. C. Villa-Vicencio and J.W. de Gruchy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), 166. 47. Z. Mbali, The Churches and Racism: A Black South African Perspective (London: SCM, 1987), 50. Cited in Pityana, ‘Tumultuous Response’, 87. 48. Pityana’s examination of the response of the churches to the 1970 decision by the World Council of Churches to fund southern African liberation movements is highly critical, but he shows how the churches affiliated to the World Council of Churches moved beyond weak-kneed subservience to the state in the 1970s, to side firmly with the oppressed in the 1980s and into direct confrontation with the state’s ‘total strategy’. Pityana does not address how this change came about, but he does refer to the importance of the leadership of Beyers Naudé, and Frank Chikane as secretary generals of the South African Council of Churches during the 1980s. 196 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

49. A. Ashforth, The Politics of Official Discourse in Twentieth-Century South Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 50. Randall, Anatomy of Apartheid, 11. 51. Letter from Dr André Muller to Peter Randall, 16 September 1970. Economics Commission: General Correspondence 1969–1972, WHP A835/Ad3 iv–v; Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand. 52. Letter from Rufus Kenney to Peter Randall, 22 September 1970, WHP A835/Ad3 iv–v, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand. 53. ‘Awareness is the Key to Change’, Race Relations News 34 (November 1972): 8. 54. Letter from W.A. de Klerk to B. Naudé, 24 May 1972, WHP A835/Da 7 ii, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand. 55. Letter from W.A. de Klerk to P. Randall, 23 May 1972, WHP A835/Da 7 ii, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand. 56. Letter from P. Randall to W.A. de Klerk, 29 May 1972, WHP A835/Da 7 ii, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand. 57. W. de Klerk, ‘Diary of a Bolander: Environment and the Campus’, The Cape Times, 13 June 1972, WHP A835/Da 7 ii, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand. 58. De Klerk, ‘Diary of a Bolander’. 59. R. Turner, ‘Thinking about Futures (an Ex-Bolander Reacts to Diary of a Bolander)’, WHP A835/Da 7 ii, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand. 60. Turner, ‘Thinking about Futures’, 5. 61. Letter from P. Randall to the Editor, 21 June 1972, WHP A835/Da 7 ii, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand. 62. Letter from J. Rossouw to R. Turner, 16 July 1972, WHP A835/Da 7 ii, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand. 63. Letter from P. Randall to R. Turner, 25 September 1972, WHP A835/Da 7 ii, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand. 64. Letter from Ivor Shapiro to ‘Bookseller’, undated, WHP A835/B11 i, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand. 65. I. Shapiro and N. Westcott, ‘Report to the Annual General Meeting of the Western Province Council of Churches’, 22 November 1973, 1, WHP A835/B11 v, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand. 66. A. Stadler, ‘Anxious Radicals: SPRO-CAS and the Apartheid Society’, Journal of Southern African Studies 2, no. 1 (1975): 102–3. The Radicalisation of the Christian Institute 197

67. Stadler, ‘Anxious Radicals’, 104. 68. Letter from Trevor Bell to Peter Randall, 11 January 1972, WHP A835/ Ad3 iv–v, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand. 69. South African Students’ Organisation, ‘Black Theology in a Plural Society’, WHP A2176/6.14, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand. 70. S. Dubow, ‘Ethnic Euphemisms and Racial Echoes’, Journal of Southern African Studies 20, no. 3 (1994): 362. 71. Dubow, ‘Ethnic Euphemisms’, 363. 72. B. Bozzoli and P. Delius, ‘Radical History and South African Society’, Radical History Review 46, no. 7 (1990): 22. 73. S. Friedman, Race, Class and Power: Harold Wolpe and the Radical Critique of Apartheid (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2015). 74. Cited in Dubow, ‘Ethnic Euphemisms’, 363. 75. Dubow, ‘Ethnic Euphemisms’, 363. 76. Randall, ‘SPRO-CAS Revisited’, 165. 77. ‘SPRO-CAS: New Plans’, Pro Veritiate 10, no. 8 (December 1971): 21. http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/pvdec71. 78. ‘SPRO-CAS: New Plans’: 22. 79. Walshe, Church versus State, 145. 80. ‘SPRO-CAS 2 is an Action Programme’, 4. 81. South African Student’s Organisation, Minutes of the Proceedings of the Executive Council Meeting Held at Edendale Ecumenical Lay Centre, Pietermaritzburg, 1–3 December 1972, 6–7. http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/ min19721203032009751. 82. D. Woods, Biko (London: Paddington Press, 1978), 58. Woods dedicated his book to the close group of activists that he knew who were members of the Black Consciousness Movement and the Christian Institute, including Mamphela Ramphele, Thenjiwe Mtintso, Malusi Mpumlwana, Beyers Naudé, Theo Kotze, Cedric Mayson, Peter Jones and Aelred Stubbs. 83. For a new study of Black Consciousness community development programmes, see L. Hadfield, ‘Restoring Human Dignity and Building Self-Reliance: Youth, Women and Churches and Black Consciousness Community Development, South Africa, 1969–1977’, Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 2010. 84. Woods, Biko, 106–13. 85. Walshe, Church versus State, 132. 86. Horst Kleinschmidt, interview, Grahamstown, 22 February 2013. 87. Kleinschmidt, interview. 198 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

88. M. Motlhabi, ‘Foreword’, in M. Mangena, On Your Own: Evolution of Black Consciousness in South Africa/Azania (Johannesburg: Skotaville, 1989), ii–iii. 89. M. Mangena, On Your Own: Evolution of Black Consciousness in South Africa/ Azania (Johannesburg: Skotaville, 1989), 36. 90. Mangena, On Your Own, 36. 91. Mangena, On Your Own, 36–7. 92. S. Buthelezi, ‘The Black Conciousness Movement in South Africa in the Late 1960s’, CEAPA Journal 1, no. 2 (1987): 24. 93. M. Lobban, White Man’s Justice: South African Political Trials in the Black Consciousness Era (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 27. 94. Bobby Marie, interview, Johannesburg, 15 February 2013. For more on Archbishop Hurley, see P. Kearney, Guardian of the Light, Denis Hurley: Renewing the Church, Opposing Apartheid (Pietermaritzburg, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 1999). 95. I. Pillay, ‘Paddy Kearney: Icon of Peace and Nonviolence’. http://www. satyagraha.org.za./word/?s=kearney. 96. S. Bate, ‘The Church under Apartheid’, in The Catholic Church in Contemporary Southern Africa, ed. J. Brain and P. Denis (Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 1999), 168–9. 97. Letter from P. Randall to N. Curtis, 28 March 1972, cc: Danie van Zyl, Bennie Khoapa, Horst Kleinschmidt, WHP A835/B11 i, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand. 98. See WHP A835/B11 v, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand. 99. Cochrane, ‘Agapé’, 61; Walshe, Church versus State, 143. 100. Letter from N. Curtis to P. Randall, 24 March 1972, WHP A835/B11 ii, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand. 101. WHP A835/B11 ii, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand. 102. Letter from P. Randall to I. Shapiro, 11 January 1974, WHP A835/B11 i, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand. 103. M. Buthelezi, ‘The Christian Institute and Black South Africa’, South African Outlook (October 1974): 162. 104. Buthelezi, ‘Christian Institute’, 164. 105. G.M. Gerhart, ‘Interview with Steve Biko’, in Biko Lives! Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko, ed. A. Mngxitama, A. Alexander and N.C. Gibson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 34. 106. Walshe, Church versus State, 159. 107. Walshe, Church versus State, 158–9. The Radicalisation of the Christian Institute 199

108. D.S. Deane, Black South Africans. A Who’s Who – 57 Profiles of Natal’s Leading Blacks (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1978), 34–5. 109. Walshe, Church versus State, 159. 110. G.S. Mukuka, ‘The Impact of Black Consciousness on the Black Catholic Clergy and Their Training from 1965–1981’, Master’s thesis, University of Natal, 1996, 10–11. See also G.S. Mukuka, The Other Side of the Story: The Silent Experience of the Black Clergy in the Catholic Church in South Africa (1898– 1976) (Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 2008). 111. See also discussion in D. Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968–1977 (Athens: Ohio University Press; Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2010), 80–99. 112. Denis, Dominican Friars, 219. 113. Mukuka, ‘Impact of Black Consciousness’, 10–11. 114. P. Butelezi, ‘Statements on Black Consciousness and Human Rights,’ 1. http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/statements-on-black-consciousness- and-human-rights. 115. S. Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010). 116. Butelezi, ‘Statements on Black Consciousness’, 2. 117. Butelezi, ‘Statements on Black Consciousness’, 2. 118. Butelezi, ‘Statements on Black Consciousness’, 7–8. 119. M. Horrell, D. Horner and J. Hudson, A Survey of Race Relations in South Africa, 1974 (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1975), 47. 120. Ecunews Bulletin 22 (16 July 1975): 3. 121. A. Egan, ‘Catholic Intellectuals’, in The Catholic Church in Contemporary Southern Africa, ed. J. Brain and P. Denis (Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 1999), 340. Egan shows how the NCFS followed a similar organisational trajectory to NUSAS. Like NUSAS, NCFS leaders were often in danger of alienating its student constituency as their thinking pushed far ahead of students. Such radicalism, Egan argues, was responsible for a conservative swing away from politics by the NCFS at the end of the 1970s. The NCFS leaders had gone ‘too far, too quickly’ and had ‘succeeded in alienating considerable sections of their constituency’, A. Egan, The Politics of a South African Catholic Student Movement, 1960–1987, Communications Series, No. 20 (1991) (Cape Town: Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town), 78. 122. A. Nolan, ‘The Option for the Poor in South Africa’, in Resistance and Hope: South African Essays in Honour of Beyers Naudé, ed. C. Villa-Vicencio and J.W. de Gruchy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), 190–1. 200 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

123. Ecunews Bulletin 22 (16 July 1975): 4. 124. S. Rakoczy, Regional Report: South Africa, Catholic Theology Worldwide: Regional Reports, 30 January 2004. http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/INSeCT/ wwide/southafrica-rakoczy.html. 125. A. Egan, ‘Christianity as an Intellectual Tradition in South Africa: Les Trahisons des Clercs?’, in Intellectual Traditions in South Africa: Ideas, Individuals and Institutions, ed. P. Vale, L. Hamilton and E. Prinsloo (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2014), 254. The State Responds 201

Chapter 6

The State Responds

Steve Biko was the finest human being I have known. He has been to me a son, a leader, and a friend. He is my brother in Christ. He had proved himself fit to take his place with Nelson Mandela and Robert Sobukwe as the true leaders, not of the blacks only, but of all the people of South Africa. ––– Aelred Stubbs, September 19771

n 1974 the new leadership of the South African Students’ Organisation I(SASO) moved towards a more confrontational approach with the state. Building on a protest that had occurred at the University of the Western Cape the previous year, which had seen between 13 000 and 20 000 people pack the Athlone Athletic Park in Cape Town on 8 July 1973, SASO leaders sought to ‘mobilise mass support for their struggles’.2 SASO planned to stage a rally at Currie’s Fountain in Durban on 25 September 1974 to celebrate the independence of Mozambique from colonial rule, which had been announced on 7 September by the new Portuguese government. The day before the rally, the minister of police, Jimmy Kruger, told Parliament it had been banned. SASO refused to back down and printed thousands of leaflets advertising the march. An estimated 5 000 people converged on Currie’s Fountain only to be met with police and dogs. The rally was brutally broken up when the dogs were set on the assembled people. Matching the demonstrations in Durban, students held a rally at Turfloop on 25 September 1974, following its annual SASO week.3 Militant slogans and posters were placed on the road to the entrance of the university, with wording such as ‘Frelimo fought and regained our soil, our dignity. It is a story. Change the name and the story applies to YOU’; ‘Revolution!! Machel will Help! Away with Vorster Ban! We are not

201 202 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

Afro Black Power!!!’4 Following the discretion of the university rector, the university authorities waited until the arrival of a large contingent of police before removing the placards. The support for the rally and the rejection of white education expressed there caused sufficiently grave concern for Prime Minister B.J. Vorster to appoint Justice J.H. Synman to head a commission of inquiry into the cause of the unrest, which Vorster judged be in the interests of all the black universities.5 The commission found SASO primarily responsible for the agitation and virtually coterminous with the Turfloop Student Representative Council, as it observed that after 1969 a ‘period of unprecedented unrest’ had broken out at the university.6 Together, these slogans and the events at Currie’s Fountain indicated that a new spirit of open opposition had invigorated black students. Unlike the careful planning and strategising of SASO’s early years, a new level of leadership was more willing to resort to open confrontation. As Xolela Mangcu argues, Biko opposed such a risky move of open defiance against the government for fear that it would lead to a crackdown on the movement, a fear that proved to be true.7 An estimated 37 activists were detained under South Africa’s anti- terrorist legislation after the FRELIMO rallies.8 Nine SASO activists were formally prosecuted for their role in organising the march: Saths Cooper, Zithulele Cindi, Mosiuoa Lekota, Aubrey Mokoape, Strini Moodley, Muntu Myeza, Pandelani Nefolovhodwe, Nkwenkwe Nkomo and Kaborane Sedibe.9 Their lengthy prosecution became known as the ‘SASO Nine Trial’. Gail Gerhart, the American political scientist who interviewed Biko in October 1972 in Durban and was a close observer of subsequent events, wrote shortly after the trial – which was held in Pretoria, as the government feared that a political trial would provide activists with a public platform:

Aware that the eyes of the country were on them, the accused used the trial to restate the nationalist viewpoint, and took every opportunity to symbolize their defiance of the state by singing freedom songs and raising clenched fists in the courtroom. Thus, instead of contributing to the suppression of Black Consciousness ideology, the trial, by giving the accused a continuous public platform through the press, merely The State Responds 203

disseminated that ideology even more widely, and held up to youth once again a model of ‘rebel’ courage.10

Such ‘rebel’ courage particularly influenced black high school students in South Africa. While the SASO Nine were incarcerated, black students in Soweto were taught by the expelled students of Fort Hare and Turfloop, such as Abram Onkgopotse Tiro, who taught history at Morris Isaacson High School for almost a year and made a ‘huge impact’.11 Tiro would become one of the martyrs of the Movement, when on 1 February 1974, he was assassinated in Botswana by a letter bomb.12 The historian Anne Heffernan thinks that ‘at least ten’ expelled students taught in Soweto between 1972 and 1975.13 It is no exaggeration to draw a clear link between the students who marched on 16 June 1976 in protest against the compulsory use of Afrikaans in the classroom and the student teachers inspired by involvement in SASO. Rick Turner was called as a witness by the defence and appeared in court to testify on 29 March 1976. Other witnesses included Dr Adam Small, Dr Manas Buthelezi and Biko. At the same time Turner was witness, the Afrikaans poet and dissident Breyten Breytenbach was being tried in the adjoining courtroom for treason on account of his involvement with the secret organisation Okhela, which was aligned with the African National Congress (ANC). Breytenbach later recalled, in a characteristically playful way, catching a glimpse of Turner’s ‘red beard’ as Turner sat alone in the courtroom.14 As Andrew Nash shows in his intellectual history of the period, Breytenbach’s and Turner’s personal journeys interlinked in evocative ways, beginning with their early student days at the University of Cape Town, where they were influenced by the Afrikaans philosopher Martin Versfeld.15 Both men are representative of an intellectual tradition Nash calls ‘the dialectical tradition’, characterised by a commitment to open discussion and thinking, self-discovery and a conception of the self as ‘process rather than essence’.16 More importantly, both men grasped the significance of ‘the extent to which historical forces constrain individual autonomy’.17 Their parallel journeys indicate that there were alternative paths outside of the confines of this book, a point that reinforces rather than weakens the argument that it was a rich period of alternative voices, rather than a sterile wilderness monopolised by the National Party. 204 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

Making the trip from Durban to Pretoria after almost exactly three years of house arrest, Turner’s testimony provided insight and reflection on his time of activism before 1973 and no doubt his continued engagement with developments thereafter. It highlighted his close knowledge of SASO and shed light on the space shared between activists. In giving evidence at the SASO Nine Trial, Turner mentioned how he had actively studied black student politics and recalled his involvement in speaking on black campuses and meeting with black student leaders, particularly with members of SASO at the Alan Taylor Residence. It was both in terms of his reading of the new developments in the press and through ‘personal contact and meetings’ that Turner was able to grasp the nature of the changes taking place in the black student community.18 In terms of his more personal relations, Turner mentioned his ‘discussions with a number of SASO leaders on general questions of South African society, specifically in connection with SASO’.19 He noted that he had attended the opening of SASO’s third general student conference in Durban in 1971, as well as a seminar on the topic ‘Black Consciousness and its Relevance for Black Life’, also held in Durban in 1971. Part of Turner’s strategy was to challenge the prosecution’s expert witness, Stoffel van der Merwe, a senior lecturer in politics at the Rand Afrikaans Universiteit, on his use of SASO and Black People’s Convention (BPC) documents out of their original context. According to Turner, the prosecution had not distinguished between ‘policy documents’ and ‘reactive’ documents. They had also failed to make the distinction between organisational discussion and concrete policy decisions and had not taken into account the relative importance of documents in relation to each other. Van der Merwe had used SASO documents, seized by the Security Branch, to try to establish ‘a framework of theory which would identify features of black consciousness ideology likely to lead to revolution, which could be used to measure the revolutionary nature of BPC and SASO’. 20 He presented a theory, which he argued ‘had diagnostic value to predict and identify a revolutionary group’. As Michael Lobban points out, this was the ‘necessary crux of his evidence’ because Black Consciousness organisations had assiduously avoided overtly revolutionary activity.21 In response to Van der Merwe’s diagnostic model, Turner presented his own collection of Black Consciousness material, a fact that The State Responds 205 further impressed his own deep engagement with the Movement. He distinguished, however, between the policy documents of the General Student’s Council, its branch reports and occasional publications, and the speeches by individual members. Evidently these could not be accorded the same importance: ‘One cannot treat these all on exactly the same level of analysis,’ he argued, ‘one has to categorise one’s documents . . . and then weigh each document in the light of its position in the overall organisation.’22 SASO/BPC documents needed to be weighed up and read alongside a proper analysis of the organisation. This required close knowledge and sensitivity in judgement, which the court’s legal, document-based approach did not fulfil. Moreover, there was a danger that language itself could be misleading. Drawing on the latest linguistic, anthropological and social psychology material available, Turner, like Biko, argued that political language needed to be understood in terms of its specific context. Quoting from Murray Edelman, a political scientist based at the University of Wisconsin- Madison and widely known for the book The Symbolic Uses of Politics (1964), he reminded the court: ‘The realistic study of political language and its meaning is necessarily a probing not only of dictionaries nor of word counts, but of the diverse responses to particular modes of expression of audiences in disparate social settings.’ 23 Thus, he concluded that qualification and further research was required for a proper understanding of ‘Black use of language, Black perceptions, Black use of ideas in South Africa’. 24 He cited the example of Nkwenkwe Nkomo, one of the accused, whose background was in the evangelical churches and whose speeches tended towards a robust, bellicose form of expression associated with the fiery preaching of his church background. It was thus evident that the qualifications of the prosecution to render a fair and nuanced assessment of the reality of SASO, and therefore the culpability of the accused, were inadequate. Turner also emphasised how SASO always focused its activities within prescribed ‘legal’ parameters and called for qualification on the charge, levelled by the prosecution, that SASO was seeking a regime change. Rather, Turner pointed out that SASO accepted ‘certain regime norms and values’, such as freedom of speech and freedom of association, but was ‘operating and using these aspects of regime norms and values in criticising other aspects of the way in which the regime functions’.25 Turner stressed: 206 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

A point which strikes me over and over again in attempting to interpret this is that their political activity has . . . always aimed at finding within the existing regime methods of activity, and in that sense they are saying: look, this regime gives us scope for doing certain things, but we don’t want all aspects of the regime we clearly want some change but we have scope within the regime for working for changes in other aspects of the regime.26

It was therefore incorrect to assert, as the prosecution did, that SASO was rejecting the entire regime; if that were the case, the most rational course of action would be to go underground and ‘attempt to use violence’.27 Turner argued the crucial point from his analysis of the documentation: where violent imagery may occur, it ‘[did] not reach the level of policy and become the policy of the organisation’.28 Turner and the other expert members of the defence, such as Professor Robert Gurr, were highly successful in destroying the credibility of the diagnostic model proposed by Van der Merwe. In his interim ruling, the judge, Boshoff J., was forced to concede that a distinction needed to be drawn between a revolutionary and a protest group, ‘which might overlap in terms of objectives, organization, and tactics, but which differed in strategies and demands’.29 He recognised that ‘revolutionary groups demand the destruction of the existing political, economic and social system’ and worked in secret, and thus did not use demonstrations and strikes, as SASO and BPC had done. Called to the dock after two years under a banning, Biko made the journey to Pretoria in May 1976 to testify in the SASO Nine Trial. On his way to Pretoria, he took the trouble to visit Johan Fick, the past leader of the Afrikaner Studente Bond in Johannesburg, whom he had met at the Abe Bailey conference in 1970.30 This point illustrates Biko’s personal openness, even where it was at odds with SASO policy, which as early as its 1970 General Students’ Council had condemned the Afrikaner Studente Bond ‘as an incorrigible group with whom only nominal contact may be maintained’.31 Biko’s testimony at the SASO Nine Trial was later published as an edited book by Millard Arnold, director of the Southern Africa Project of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights under Law in Washington, D.C. Arnold drew attention The State Responds 207 to the importance of Biko’s brilliant exposition and defence over four and a half days, similarly showing how the trial became a crucial public platform for the defence and elaboration of Black Consciousness ideas. Biko’s rhetorical sparring with the state’s advocate, Mr. K. Attwell, after being called to the witness stand on 2 May 1976 by David Soggot, senior counsel for the defence, provided a riveting insight into the development of his thought over the preceding years.32 It was also an exercise fraught with danger, as ‘the slightest miscue could result in harsh penalties for the defendants’, 33 especially because Biko’s testimony became ‘a focal point in the efforts of lawyers for both the state and the defense to prove their respective cases’.34 Biko’s testimony on the first day covered the formation of SASO and explained the rationale for Black Consciousness, particularly the choice of the label ‘Black’ and the use of the phrase ‘Black is Beautiful’. Part of the impact of his testimony was the forthright way in which Biko explained the frustrations and bitterness towards white society that were felt by black people, as well as the physical and psychological impacts of the legal and political machinery of oppression on black lives. For example, Biko explained why he considered it a ‘miracle’ to reach adulthood in the townships, given the high levels of murder and rape there. He defended the position adopted by SASO, which called for an end to foreign investment in South Africa, on the grounds that foreign companies benefited from cheap black labour, which embodied the selfsame exploitation and dehumanisation that foreign governments simultaneously condemned.35 As Arnold shows, Soggott followed the standard strategy of attempting to portray Biko in the most favourable light as a witness and, through his line of questioning, attempted to downplay the state’s accusation of promoting racial hostility by portraying the activities of SASO as chiefly concerned with the development of the black community. Biko was forthright in his elaboration of the appeal to a ‘Black Communalism’ and delineated in more detail what such an economic system should look like – a more socialist economy, with state intervention and land expropriation to rectify a historical land takeover by white colonialists. Such a system would seek to embody the values of African cultural life, which downplayed individualism and asserted the importance of the community, without advocating a return 208 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS to pre-capitalist relations. On the second day of his testimony, Soggot questioned Biko through a detailed explanation of the logic and steps that led to the formation of the BPC. In his testimony Biko was able to explain the policy choices and struck a fine balance between tact and candidness. Biko explained the existence of BPC as an ‘aboveboard’ movement, which implied ‘an acceptance of the ambit of the law’ and a recognition that they were therefore ‘constrained by the law’.36 Biko’s engagement with the state prosecutor, Advocate Attwell, necessarily changed tone and tactic. Attwell attempted to establish a link between SASO and the banned liberation movements, the ANC and Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), to enable the broader charge against the nine of promoting racial hostility to hold. In response to Attwell’s attempts at drawing attention to SASO’s language of confrontation, Biko emphasised the importance of context – for example, remembering that ‘when we [in SASO] expressed our withdrawal of recognition from NUSAS as a national students’ organisation, we did express it in pretty tough language’ and noting that the ‘usage of tough language by SASO is quite usual, quite common. It is an expression of the way Blacks feel.’37 Despite the success of the expert defence, the court was able to prosecute the accused on the charge of promoting racial hostility.38 While the central contention of the defence was that ‘the language and content of SASO and BPC documents cannot be understood without an appreciation of the reality experienced from day to day by the black community’, Lobban shows that the prosecution was able to discount the ‘black world’, as represented by the defence, and trivialise the disempowerment of black people in South Africa. The prosecution sidestepped the expert witness of Turner and Gurr, as they argued that Van der Merwe’s model could not be viewed ‘bit by bit’, but needed to be taken as ‘a whole’.39 As Lobban notes, the trial was unique because it prosecuted ideas, rather than actions, and the SASO Nine were eventually convicted because of the revolutionary potential of their ideas. The complexities and pressures of court-room testimony notwithstanding, both Biko’s and Turner’s defences gave insight into the dynamics of the early 1970s. Turner’s defence showed his engagement with Black Consciousness intellectually; he understood its The State Responds 209 aims and goals and further identified with Black Consciousness, which he recognised as a ‘form of radicalism’. There were congruencies with his own view, as he emphasised consciousness and strategic change within the confines of the law. His own study of Black Consciousness, and his personal engagement with Biko and SASO leaders, thus enabled Turner to mount an effective defence in the SASO Trial. It was just over a month after Biko’s testimony that the Soweto schoolchildren marched in opposition to the imposition of Afrikaans in Bantu Education schools. Biko had been the toast of Soweto for his towering performance in Pretoria’s Old Synagogue and his ‘frank talk’ that had more than justified the nom de plume he had adopted six years earlier.

‘A kind of extended ministry’ Writing in September 1977 from a lonely hut at Masite Mission, in the west of Lesotho in the Maluti Mountains, just over the border from the Free State and 68 kilometres south of the capital, Maseru, Aelred Stubbs, the Community of the Resurrection monk and erstwhile principal of St Peter’s College at the Federal Theological Seminary at Alice, reflected on the preceding years of his ministry. As we saw, it was in Alice that Stubbs came into contact with the Biko family, first with Khaya, Steve’s elder brother, who was expelled along with 40 other students from Lovedale College in May 1963 and charged with membership of Poqo, the armed wing of the PAC. Stubbs had been deeply involved from the beginning, pleading in Khaya’s defence as was noted, a role that perhaps encapsulated perfectly his liberal position. This role, though, had also served as an introduction to Steve, who continued to write to Stubbs until the end of his life.40 Stubbs’s early role in the trial of Khaya Biko and the Lovedale students developed into a ministry to the students of what became the Black Consciousness Movement. As the fortunes of the Movement began to wane as a result of government repression, he remained a committed supporter. At the trial of the SASO Nine in 1975, Stubbs cut a lone figure, ‘day after day . . . clad in the black and white robes of . . . the Community of the Resurrection’, keeping ‘vigil in the sparsely-occupied public gallery of Court C of Pretoria’s Palace of Justice’.41 210 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

His ‘letter to friends’ of 1977 gave insight into the particular role that he had played in the preceding years from his time as principal at St Peter’s to his exit from the Republic of South Africa to Lesotho in 1977, after the apartheid government withdrew the special exemption on his British passport that allowed him to stay in the country without a visa.42 He reflected how ‘over the last five years I have built up a kind of personal ministry to various persons in different parts of the country who are under banning and/or house arrest restriction orders’.43 He remembered, in particular, ‘the removal from St. Peter’s College, Alice, whilst I was still Principal, of Stanley Sabelo Ntwasa. He was put under banning and house arrest at his home in Kimberley, and clearly I had a direct pastoral obligation towards him.’44 Ntwasa had been a theological student at the Federal Theological Seminary, engaged as the co-ordinator of the Black Theology project of the University Christian Movement (UCM). On 17 February 1972, he was issued with a banning order.45 In the same year, three other prominent churchmen were also banned: Basil Moore, Methodist minister and president of the UCM, David de Beer, a staff member of the Christian Institute, and Stephen Hayes, the young Anglican minister who got into trouble for outspoken support of the Ovamboland strikes in what was then South West Africa.46 The other ministries that Stubbs engaged in ‘grew out of personal contacts’ and included Robert Sobukwe and Jerry Modisane, as a result of Stubbs visiting Ntwasa in Kimberley, the former UCM co- ordinator Justice Moloto in Mafeking, banned Catholic priest Cosmas Desmond and former National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) leader Dave de Beer in Johannesburg, and NUSAS activists Paul Pretorius and Clive Keegan in Cape Town. In Durban, Stubbs made a point of visiting BPC director Bennie Khoapa and banned SASO activist and priest Rubin Phillip, who had also been a student at the Federal Theological Seminary. Lastly, Stubbs had remembered ‘in particular’ to visit Barney Pityana, whom he described as ‘an old friend from his Fort Hare days’, in Port Elizabeth, and of course Biko in King William’s Town.47 As a result of his ‘growing friendship’ with Biko, Stubbs remembered that ‘a kind of extended ministry’ had taken shape, ‘of a personal and unofficial nature’, to what he remembered as ‘the remarkable black community’ around King William’s Town. Stubbs The State Responds 211 recognised that the state had conducted a ‘campaign of terror against that community’, which had begun with the murder of Mapetla Mohapi on 5 August 1976 and had led to his ministry to the community being ‘intensified’. Stubbs saw the broader attempt of the state to crush the Black Consciousness Movement beginning after September 1974 and saw his own ‘exclusion from the Republic . . . as a very small part of that relentless campaign’.48 Stubbs’s letter reflected the changes in fortune of the Movement – the date of September 1974 – marked by the pro-FRELIMO rallies organised by SASO and the BPC in Durban at Currie’s Fountain and at the University of the North, Turfloop. However, Stubbs’s letter omitted the fact that repression had begun as early as 1972, when the first strikes broke out across the ethnic universities set up under Bantu Education. The deaths of Mthuli ka Shezi (December 1972), Abram Tiro (1 February 1974) and Mohapi in differing circumstances had signalled the state’s growing maleficence. As Daniel Magaziner discusses, this created a sober reflection on the reality of death in the Movement, but also enabled a victory over fear.49 Stubbs’s memory of the ‘remarkable community’ that existed in and around King William’s Town evoked a sense of the hub of activity in the town, generated through the activities of the Black Community Programmes (BCP), which employed Biko when he was banned to the area in February 1973 on the recommendation of the interim findings of the Schlebusch Commission. Stubbs was midway through the completion of the letter when he received news of Biko’s murder. In the letter he struggled to comprehend the gravity of Biko’s death in detention. His letter stopped abruptly and, inserting the date, 14 September 1977, he attempted to articulate his feelings. ‘Nearly twenty four hours after receiving the news I am unable to grasp its full horror,’ he began. He had been requested by the Archbishop of Cape Town and church leaders in South Africa and Britain to remain silent for fear that public comment may jeopardise his visa arrangement. However, Stubbs could not remain silent. ‘Steve Biko was the finest human being I have known,’ he wrote. ‘He has been to me a son, a leader, and a friend. He is my brother in Christ. He had proved himself fit to take his place with Nelson Mandela and Robert Sobukwe as the true leaders, not of the blacks only, but 212 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS of all the people of South Africa.’ For Stubbs, Biko’s death had put South Africa on a par with ‘Soviet Russia and all other tyrannies where men and women are treated as things’. He further revealed a sense of his religious calling in his commitment to the members of the Black Consciousness Movement, the young students he had met more than a decade previously. For Stubbs, Biko’s death had ‘revealed to me, earlier than I had thought I would be able to receive it, what I have nevertheless known to be implicit in the call, the real nature of this vocation – to stand at the foot of the Cross while those I love are crucified’.50 On 25 September, after a period of ten days, Stubbs’s sermon at Priory Chapel, Masite, Lesotho, at the service to commemorate Biko’s passing, began to assess Biko’s contribution and that of the Movement he had helped to establish. Writing of Black Consciousness, Stubbs recognised it as ‘an astonishing achievement, this restoration to a people of its humanity. And not only to blacks, because it is whites who are dehumanised by the ideology of racial superiority even more than blacks.’51 Stubbs regarded Biko as ‘the unquestioned leader’ of the Movement, describing ‘an almost frightening charisma’, which had been ‘tempered by adversity’ in the four years since his banning in 1973. Recalling the ‘long letters we were free to write to one another’, he had reminded Biko of his namesake, Stephen, the first Christian martyr, and that Biko too may one day have to suffer. Although Biko had laughingly replied that he did not have a martyr’s constitution, Stubbs recognised that Biko’s ‘courage and steadfastness’ stemmed from a deep love for his people. Biko tragically died on 12 September 1977. He had been brutally assaulted in police detention in Port Elizabeth’s Sanlam Building and left with brain damage. He was then driven 1 200 kilometres to Pretoria in the back of a police van and died there. It was a cruel machination of the state, in bringing Biko back mentally incapacitated to the capital, which had seen his dominant intellectual performance in court the year before. Although Biko’s death led to a storm of international condemnation, Minister of Police Jimmy Kruger infamously responded to the news of Biko’s death at the Transvaal National Party Congress with the words, ‘Dit laat my koud’ (It leaves me cold).52 The state banned seventeen Black Consciousness organisations on 17 October 1977, two weeks after the funeral of Biko, and effectively crushed SASO, The State Responds 213 the BPC and the community development initiatives established under the BCP. The state confiscated the assets of the BCP, destroyed the leather-working factor at Njwaxa and took over the Zanempilo Health Centre.53 After the conclusion of the SASO Nine Trial, the accused were sentenced to a minimum of five years on Robben Island. Pityana and his wife Dimza left South Africa in 1978 for exile and he worked as a parish priest in London and then as director of the World Council of Churches’ Programme to Combat Racism in Geneva. Beyers Naudé was banned in 1977, along with the Christian Institute. Donald Woods escaped the country on New Year’s Eve 1978. The wave of bannings and murders by the state occurred in the aftermath of an upwelling of popular revolt, sparked when the Soweto schoolchildren marched on 16 June 1976, signalling that apartheid was firmly on the defensive.54 The state’s action against SASO, the BPC and the Christian Institute aimed to destroy the broad base of interlinked progressive activism that had coalesced from the late 1960s through the course of the 1970s. Black Consciousness had been central to the modulated political rhetoric and analysis that undergirded this alignment of South African civil society to a co-ordinated oppositional stance against apartheid. The final issue of Pro Veritate, for September 1977, featured a full-sized portrait of Biko on its front cover. The portrait was a powerful symbol of how far the ecumenical periodical had come from its early beginnings, when it had primarily been concerned with the ‘problem of race’ in a very abstract and academic way. Editor and member of the Christian Institute Cedric Mayson reflected: the ‘martyrdom’ of Biko had revealed the real nature and ‘true circumstances’ of apartheid South Africa.55 Biko’s martyrdom cut ‘through the fog of confused thinking and muddled motives’ and showed that the government sought to impose ‘white domination’ with ‘power and violence’. Black Consciousness had been acknowledged by members of all races as a central and authentic component in the search for the ‘fullness of humanity and liberation which Christ proclaimed’. Reinier Holst, editor of the Christian Institute’s Natal regional newsletter, agreed. Biko was a radical, but ‘always in dialogue with those white people who sincerely grappled with their role in a changing political scene’.56 The murder of Biko at the hands of the apartheid state released a wave of international condemnation, occurring so soon after the 214 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

Soweto Uprising the year before, and galvanised the United Nations to impose ‘a mandatory arms embargo’ on South Africa.57 Biko’s funeral in King William’s Town on 25 September 1977 was the largest and most publicised Black Consciousness public event to that point, as 20 000 mourners converged on the town for the ceremony under the banner of the BPC.58 Representatives of the United States and other Western governments also attended. The Anglican Bishop of Lesotho, Desmond Tutu, addressed the funeral, having returned to South Africa on the news of Biko’s death. In his address, Tutu pronounced a benediction on Biko and Black Consciousness. Tutu compared the life and death of Biko with that of Christ: ‘We too, like the disciples of Jesus, have been stunned by the death of another young man in his thirties.’59 Biko had been a ‘young man completely dedicated to the pursuit of justice and righteousness, of peace and reconciliation. A young man completely committed to radical change in our beloved land.’ God had called Biko ‘to be his servant in South Africa’ as the ‘founder father’ of the Black Consciousness Movement. It was, Tutu unhesitatingly affirmed, a movement of God that ‘sought to awaken in the black person a sense of his intrinsic value and worth’, ‘not needing to apologise for his existential condition as a black person’. Black Consciousness was essential and was the grounds for true reconciliation to be possible. In retrospect, Tutu’s public address at Biko’s funeral symbolised that the mantle of leadership in the internal struggle against apartheid had been passed on. Tutu was made general secretary of the South African Council of Churches in March 1978, a position from which he increasingly led the civil society resistance of the 1980s. He was in attendance at the launch of the Azanian People’s Organisation in Soweto in April 1978.60 The following year activists launched the Azanian Students’ Organisation, as well as the Congress of South African Students. The assassination of another activist in Durban harkened back to another remarkable community. Almost four months to the day after Biko’s death, Turner was murdered at his home in Dalton Avenue, Bellair, in Durban. He was shot through the window by an unknown assassin and died in the arms of his oldest daughter, Jann. Opposition forces had lost their two key intellectuals within the space of less than half a year. The State Responds 215

Turner’s response to Black Consciousness, as we have seen, sensed the political possibilities in its radicalism, but in his view, the correct focus was a positive affirmation of persons and the creation of a new culture that affirmed their dignity, rather than a negative rejection of white liberalism. He saw the significance of radical thought in its embodiment of a rejection of capitalism and apartheid, which was congruent with the demands of full citizenship and equality of black South Africans.61 A new political model was called for, one that rejected avarice and consumerism and embraced instead a ‘Christian model’ based on genuine community and love. But events overtook Biko’s and Turner’s debates and efforts that strove for a new culture; achieved partly, for Biko, through black self-reliance, and, for both men, facilitated by a change in consciousness. The losses of Turner and Biko were severe blows for the type of political engagement that had characterised the 1970s. Their importance stemmed from their leadership as much as their ideas. Even if the influence of Turner’s personality and ideas were on the wane by this time, a combination of the isolation enforced by a government banning order and the new direction taken by a group of younger activists,62 his presence was still sorely missed. In an interview, trade unionist and lawyer Halton Cheadle wistfully remarked that Turner could have influenced the nature of the debate of the 1980s, not necessarily by fundamentally altering the politics of the moment, which would be beyond any human to do, but by ensuring a more rational discussion that valued clarity of thought and goals.63 Black Consciousness after 1977 also lacked the breadth of Biko’s intellect and his personal openness. What Biko left behind was his political analysis and his abiding and powerful memory, but these were poor substitutes for the man himself. Turner’s memorial service was held in Durban at St Anthony’s Hall, where a crowd of ‘about 1000 awaited the arrival of the family at the hall’.64 The speakers at the service all paid tribute to Turner’s special contribution. Tony Morphet was quoted in a booklet published by the Christian action group Diakonia, recalling Turner’s ‘charismatic power to move people to action’ and how he had offered an ‘intellectual challenge and an emotional challenge’, which impelled people to revalue their lives and opened ‘perspectives to new ways of living’.65 216 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

Theologian Manas Buthelezi called it a day where South Africa had to ‘ask herself ’ some ‘fundamental questions’.66 South Africa needed more, not fewer, people like Turner, who were prepared to identify with those different in colour and ‘in political circumstance’. The day would come, he prophesied, when South Africa would be confronted with ‘the ghastly’ cataclysmic consequences of apartheid’s racial polarisation. The government would then wish that Turner had not been killed, that Naudé had been given ‘a few more years of addressing South Africa’. What would remain when there would be no more whites who were ‘prepared to stretch’ out the hand of friendship, ‘not just in words and thoughts but in actual action’ and blacks would only be confronted with ‘an expression of bad will’? The only recourse Buthelezi foresaw would be violent revolution and interracial war. Also speaking at the memorial service were Alan Paton, the Catholic Archbishop of Durban, Denis Hurley, Professor Lawrence Schlemmer, past NUSAS president, Charles Nupen, organiser of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, Thizi Khumalo, principal of the University of Natal, Professor N.D. Clarence, chairman of the Natal Indian Congress, M.J. Naidoo, and Turner’s mother, Jane. The common themes were Turner’s generosity, how his personal vision matched the transcendental ethic of religion and the recognition that South Africa had lost someone of unusual gifts. He had been selfless in the service of his society, providing advice where needed, who was, as Khumalo put it, ‘always prepared to listen’. According to his Durban colleague, Eddie Webster, Turner’s legacy was that ‘he successfully combined a radical vision of the future with an argument for the strategic use of power’.67 Central to his strategy was the innovation of class theory and the notion of radical reform, rather than a revolutionary rupture with the old order. Informed no doubt by the trauma of seeing his friends’ lives destroyed through their decisions to engage in sabotage in the previous decade, Turner rejected armed insurrection as well as economic sanctions and instead advocated using the means available to bring about radical change. Following his advice, close friend Tony Morphet had worked with the Progressive Federal Party. Along with others, they had formed a so-called ‘ginger group’ within the party and helped it to win the local Durban City Council elections in 1977, a position it had used to repeal many of the city’s petty apartheid laws.68 The State Responds 217

Conclusions This disparate collection of individuals – Stubbs, Tutu, Morphet, Hurley, Nupen, Khumalo and many others – grouped together at the traumatic end of an epoch, signalled the eclecticism of the multiple trajectories and traditions of ideas that had been its hallmark. It seemed this group drew closer as tragedy struck and as repression overrode the nuances of differences in strategies and understanding of South African society, replacing these tensions instead with an increased sense of the necessity of fundamental change in the face of the growing nightmare of the possibility of racial civil war. In their choice of witnesses, the defence team for the SASO Nine had signalled the strength of the Black Consciousness Movement, which listed highly articulate intellectuals from the church and universities among its apologists. Stubbs had emerged from a position of relative obscurity in the story, to become the prominent figure, by virtue of his protection as a religious monk, to help hold together the fragmenting constellation of activists. Thus it was at the end of the Movement that its broad support base was most clearly revealed.

Notes . 1 Letter from Aelred Stubbs to friends, September 1977, KCM 98/3/59 Statements/Papers/Press Releases, Killie Campbell Africana Library, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban. 2. J. Brown, The Road to Soweto: Resistance and the Uprising of 16 June 1976 (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2016), 132–5. 3. J.G.E. Wolfson, Turmoil at Turfloop: A Summary of the Reports of the Snyman and Jackson Commissions of Inquiry into the University of the North (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1976), 26. 4. Wolfson, Turmoil at Turfloop, 28. 5. Wolfson, Turmoil at Turfloop, 3. 6. Wolfson, Turmoil at Turfloop, 15. 7. X. Mangcu, Biko: A Biography (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2012), 192. 8. ‘2nd Report on Arrests, Detentions and Trials of Members and Supporters of South African Students Organisation, Black People’s Convention, Black Allied Workers Union, Theatre Council of Natal, Black Community Programmes’, issued by the Program for Social Change, 23 December 1974, 218 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

Mary Benson Papers, 6/2/12, Institute of Commonwealth Studies Library, London. 9. G.M. Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 299. 10. Gerhart, Black Power, 298. 11. C. Glaser, ‘ “We Must Infiltrate the Tsotsis”: School Politics and Youth Gangs in Soweto, 1968–1976’, Journal of Southern African Studies 24, no. 2 (1998): 305. 12. A. Heffernan, ‘Black Consciousness’s Lost Leader: Abraham Tiro, the University of the North, and the Seeds of South Africa’s Student Movement in the 1970s’, Journal of Southern African Studies 41, no. 1 (2015): 181; Glaser, ‘ “We Must Infiltrate the Tsotsis” ’. 13. Heffernan, ‘Black Consciousness’s Lost Leader’, 187. 14. Cited in A. Nash, The Dialectical Tradition in South Africa (New York: Routledge, 2009), 161. 15. Nash detects Versfeld’s influence on Turner and on Breyten Breytenbach, noting many parallels between their lives and their ideas, noting that ‘the points at which Turner and Breytenbach’s ideas were closest to each other were also those at which they shared common ground with Versfeld’. Nash, Dialectical Tradition, 163. Versfeld critiqued Marxism as an ‘ersatz theology, vulnerable to the critique of Christianity’, as it was an ideology that ‘usurps its prerogative’ by substituting the knowledge of God for self-knowledge. Thus a ‘genuine Christian confrontation with Marxism’ was one that acknowledged that Marxism was not radical enough, as it ‘has a vested interest in much of what it attacks’ and represents not so much an overthrow of the bourgeois world as a development of it ‘to its limits’. Cited in Nash, The Dialectical Tradition, 162. 16. Nash, Dialectical Tradition, 131. 17. Nash, Dialectical Tradition, 160. 18. Supreme Court of South Africa (Transvaal Provincial Division), The State versus S. Cooper and Eight Others, Case No. 18/75/254 (Pretoria: Lubbe Recordings), 3011, Richard Turner Papers, E.G. Malherbe Library, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban. 19. Supreme Court of South Africa, The State versus S. Cooper and Eight Others, 3012. 20. M. Lobban, White Man’s Justice: South African Political Trials in the Black Consciousness Era (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 55. 21. Lobban, White Man’s Justice, 56 22. Supreme Court of South Africa, The State versus S. Cooper and Eight Others, 3015. The State Responds 219

23. Supreme Court of South Africa, The State versus S. Cooper and Eight Others, 3020. 24. Supreme Court of South Africa, The State versus S. Cooper and Eight Others, 3022. 25. Supreme Court of South Africa, The State versus S. Cooper and Eight Others, 3037. 26. Supreme Court of South Africa, The State versus S. Cooper and Eight Others, 3038. 27. Supreme Court of South Africa, The State versus S. Cooper and Eight Others, 3038. Turner’s analysis closely matches Barney Pityana’s assessment of the strategy of Black Consciousness in which he regrets the political naivety of attempting to work within the law to achieve political change, viewing the strategy as inherently constrained. See B. Pityana, ‘Revolution within the Law?’, in Bounds of Possibility: The Legacy of Steve Biko and Black Consciousness, ed. B. Pityana, M. Ramphele, M. Mpumlwana and L. Wilson (Cape Town: David Philip, 1991), 201–12. 28. Supreme Court of South Africa, The State versus S. Cooper and Eight Others, 3174. 29. Lobban, White Man’s Justice, 60. 30. Supreme Court of South Africa, The State versus S. Cooper and Eight Others, 4571. 31. ‘Resolution 17/70’, in ‘South African Students’ Organisation: Resolutions adopted at the 1st SASO General Students’ Council, July 4th–July 10th 1970’, 5. http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/res19700704032008744. 32. M. Arnold, ed., Steve Biko: Black Consciousness in South Africa (New York: Random House, 1979), xiii. 33. Arnold, Steve Biko, xxii. 34. Arnold, Steve Biko, xxv. 35. Arnold, Steve Biko, 31. 36. Arnold, Steve Biko, 87. 37. Arnold, Steve Biko, 157. 38. Lobban, White Man’s Justice, 60. 39. Lobban, White Man’s Justice, 76. 40. A. Stubbs, ‘Martyr of Hope: A Personal Memoir by Aelred Stubbs, CR’, in S. Biko, I Write What I Like: A Selection of His Writings (London: Penguin, 1978), 175. 41. J. Allen, ‘South Africa: Aelred Stubbs, Spiritual Mentor and Editor, Dies’, All Africa Global Media. http://allafrica.com/stories/200411180542.html?viewall =1. 42. Allen, ‘Stubbs, Spiritual Mentor’. 43. Letter from Aelred Stubbs to friends, September 1977, 2. 220 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

44. Letter from Aelred Stubbs to friends, September 1977, 3. 45. The Black Sash/ Die Swart Serp 16, no. 1 (June 1972): 15. http://www.sahistory. org.za/archive/the-black-sash/die-swart-serp. 46. M. Horrell, D. Horner, J. Kane-Berman and R. Margo, A Survey of Race Relations in South Africa, 1972 (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1973), 74–5. 47. Letter from Aelred Stubbs to friends, September 1977, 3. 48. Letter from Aelred Stubbs to friends, September 1977, 2. 49. D. Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968–1977 (Athens: Ohio University Press; Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2010), 167–70. 50. Letter from Aelred Stubbs to friends, September 1977, 5. 51. Sermon preached by Aelred Stubbs at the Mass in honour of the soul of BANTU STEVE BIKO, celebrated in the Priory Chapel, Masite, Lesotho, 25 September 1977, 2, KCM 98/3/59, Killie Campbell Africana Library, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban. 52. D. Woods, Biko (London: Paddington Press, 1978), 166. 53. L. Hadfield, ‘Biko, Black Consciousness, and “the System” eZinyoka: Oral History and Black Consciousness in Practice in a Rural Ciskei Village’, South African Historical Journal 62, no. 1 (March 2010): 95. 54. For discussions, see A. Brooks and J. Brickhill, Whirlwind before the Storm: The Origins and Development of the Uprising in Soweto and the Rest of South Africa from June to December 1976 (London: International Defence and Aid Fund for South Africa, 1980) and S. Ndlovu, The Soweto Uprisings: Counter-Memories of June 1976 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1998). 55. C. Mayson, ‘Steve Biko’, Pro Veritate 16, no. 5 (September 1977): 2. http://www. sahistory.org.za/archive/pro-veritate-volume-16-number-5-september-1977. 56. Christian Institute of Southern Africa, Natal Regional Newsletter 4 (1977): 1, uncatalogued manuscripts, KCM, Killie Campbell Africana Library, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban. 57. D. Tutu, The Rainbow People of God: South Africa’s Victory over Apartheid, edited by John Allen (London: Doubleday, 1994), 16. 58. Magaziner, Law and the Prophets, 183. 59. Tutu, Rainbow People of God, 19–20. 60. N. Gibson, ‘Black Consciousness after Biko: The Dialectics of Liberation in South Africa, 1977–1987’, in Biko Lives! Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko, ed. A. Mngxitama, A. Alexander and N.C. Gibson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 137. 61. R. Turner, ‘In Search of a New South Africa’, Pro Veritate 9, no. 5 (September 1970): 3–8. http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/PVSep7000329143009005Sep1970. The State Responds 221

62. B. Keniston, Choosing to be Free: The Life Story of Rick Turner (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2013). 63. Halton Cheadle, interview in Jann Turner’s documentary film,My Father, Rick Turner. http://www.barbara-follett.org.uk/richard_turner/part_1.html. 64. ‘A Commemoration of the Life and Work of Richard Turner: Speeches Made at the Memorial Service’, (Durban: Diakonia, 1978), 5. Richard Turner Papers, E.G. Malherbe Library, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban. 65. ‘Commemoration of the Life and Work of Richard Turner’, 8. 66. ‘Commemoration of the Life and Work of Richard Turner’, 3. 67. ‘Commemoration of the Life and Work of Richard Turner’, 4. 68. Tony Morphet, interview, Cape Town, 12 May 2010. 222 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

Conclusion

From the 1970s to Post-apartheid South Africa

hen the state banned Rick Turner and Steve Biko, together with Wother activists from the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) and the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) in 1973, imprisoned the SASO Nine, murdered Biko in 1977, banned civil society organisations such the Christian Institute in 1977, and likely arranged for the assassination of Turner in January 1978, they dealt devastating blows to the particularly open form of the progressive politics of the 1970s. It was the end of a moment, of a decade, of a flowering of broad-based initiatives intent on delivering the promises of freedom, in all its interpretations, which had informed the 1960s globally. After 1977, younger political activists, radicalised by the Soweto Uprising of 1976 and the subsequent countrywide protests, took up the political initiative. With the core of the Black Consciousness Movement’s leadership either in prison, dead or in exile, and the institutional nexus of earlier progressive organisations destroyed, they looked to the African National Congress (ANC) in exile, with thousands leaving the country to join the armed struggle.1 Biko and Black Consciousness had left an indelible mark on South Africa, even as the Movement and its leaders reeled from the state’s repression. Turner’s legacy in Durban, and the radicalisation of NUSAS, had left an imprint on the students and colleagues he helped to shape, who would remain committed to trade union activism.2 Trade union activity, catalysed by the Durban Strikes of 1973 and intellectuals aligned to the trade unions, also gathered momentum after 1977. In response to the Soweto Uprising and Biko’s death, the state sought to release pressure on the system through appointing a commission of inquiry into labour matters, officially titled the Commission of Inquiry

222 Conclusion 223 on Labour Legislation, headed by Professor Nicholas Wiehahn, an academic at the University of South Africa (UNISA) who specialised in labour relations. In 1979 the Commission released its recommendations, among which was the call for the legalisation of black trade unions, a move immediately treated with suspicion by opposition activists. Auret van Heerden, who served as NUSAS president between 1978 and 1979, argued that the Commission set out ‘a strategy of increased control of black workers’ that aimed to incorporate a selected ‘buffer class while regulating and monitoring the activities of independent black unions who would be forced to operate within structures defined by the state’.3 In the black buffer class, Van Heerden included the bureaucracies of the homelands and community councils, which sought to co-opt black leadership into positions of complicity with the apartheid government. Overall, Van Heerden saw Wiehahn’s measures as ‘an extension and intensification of state control’, rather than a genuine move ‘in the direction of industrial democracy’. Opposition to apartheid in the 1980s thus had to contend with a refined attempt at control by what Black Consciousness had fittingly called ‘the system’. The state undoubtedly played a role in sowing division within the black communities of South Africa. Together with Prime Minister P.W. Botha’s , which attempted to give Indians and Coloureds limited representation in government, the proposals of the 1979 Riekert Commission led to tightened influx control to distinguish between resident urban black ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ (those deemed temporary or illegal urban residents). In addition, the Wiehahn Commision called for the abolition of job reservation on racial lines, part of a broader attempt to create a docile black middle class as a ‘buffer’ against working class militancy.4 Together with these reforms, the state also became increasingly militarised, with intensified war in Angola and the widespread use of the army to maintain control in the black townships, which had been in flames intermittently since the Soweto Uprising. Perhaps as a result of the increased trauma of the times, or as a result of the state’s attempts to divide those opposed to it, after 1978 the ideas of class and race began to harden into clear-cut ideological opposites. It was a time that had been denuded of a continuity of leadership through the state’s imprisonment or assassination of important leaders from the 1970s, such as Biko and Turner. Political differences between opponents of 224 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS the state became more pronounced and the trade union movement became splintered on tactics and affiliations. Although the influence of Turner could be seen in the renewed focus on the black working class, with white activists confidently assuming their place in a colour-blind class struggle, his ideas were now being passed over in the search for more certain answers. Even before Turner’s death, a number of the students whom he had initially mentored were moving beyond his world view to embrace Marxism in a more complete way than Turner ever did. As Billy Keniston shows, the historian Dan O’Meara, one of the participants of the Durban Moment, recalled that as early as 1972 Turner’s honours’ students at the University of Natal were completely dissatisfied with Sartre’s complicated and obscure thinking. One of Turner’s best students, Halton Cheadle, referred to reading Sartre as similar to ‘going to a shooting gallery with a bent gun’.5 This rejection of Sartre hurt Turner, for whom the French philosopher was a key intellectual pillar, as we have seen. The Institute for Industrial Education (IIE) was also the focus of disagreements, with a newly assertive leadership of the trade union movement, embodied in the Trade Union Advisory and Co-ordinating Council (TUACC) that formed in Durban after the strikes. Members of TUACC, such as John Copelyn and Mike Murphy, considered the IIE an expensive luxury, which needed to be more firmly placed in the service of the trade union movement. There was word of workers using the IIE’s correspondence courses for personal advancement into the ranks of junior management. Foszia Fisher, who was chairperson of the IIE, was finally pressured into resigning in October 1975.6 The IIE was eventually allowed to die, as its resources were directed into the workers’ movement more directly.7 The South African Labour Bulletin survived because it was successful in establishing its autonomy from the IIE and because of Eddie Webster’s move to align the journal’s editorial board with more mainstream sociology at the liberal English universities.8 This move simultaneously enabled the introduction of the new field of labour studies into the mainstream syllabus. The development of both the New Left and Black Consciousness created serious tensions with older, more established political traditions. As we saw in the introduction, Nelson Mandela was Conclusion 225 dismissive of Black Consciousness on the basis of what he perceived as its inadequate ideology. On the other hand, the South African Communist Party (SACP) discerned in the New Left a direct threat to its position as the leader of the Left in South Africa and a threat in the Black Consciousness Movement for the challenge it posed to the SACP on its influence over the ANC, when thousands of young people left the country after the Soweto Uprising and joined the organisation.9 SACP members proceeded to launch a strong attack on the premises and legitimacy of the new traditions. Particularly offensive to the SACP and to the South African Congress of Trade Unions was the perception created when activists influenced by the New Left launched the Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU) in 1979 that they were operating on a blank slate with the workers and that no socialist history had preceded its formation.10 The 1980s were very different in feel to the mood of the 1970s. The sociologist Ari Sitas described visiting Durban in 1977 where he met Turner and others and heard of the history of the Durban Moment. But by 1982, he recalled that ‘things were quite different’.11 The creation of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in 1983 was a reflection of the resuscitation of politics on a national level, based on appeals to ‘the community’ and ‘the people’.12 Launched on 20 August 1983 at the Rocklands Community Centre in Mitchell’s Plain, a Coloured community on the outskirts of Cape Town, the UDF was led by a core of activists who had been schooled in Black Consciousness, but had moved to embrace the non-racialism of the resurrected Congress tradition. Among the significant leaders of the UDF were Allan Boesak, a black theologian; Frank Chikane, a former Turfloop SASO member; and Aubrey Mokoena, another former Black Consciousness activist. Together, this leadership indicated the importance of Black Consciousness as a school of formation of a new generation of leaders, even if many, if not most, moved to embrace non-racialism. They undoubtedly owed their ‘conscientisation’, to use the buzzword of the time, to Black Consciousness. The demands of the UDF were clear, encapsulated in ‘three little words’ that Boesak put to the delegates in Mitchell’s Plain, ‘all, here, and now : “we want all our rights, we want them here and we want them now” ’.13 These demands were similar to the Black 226 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

Consciousness emphasis on the immediate, but they were focused instead on demanding rights from the state, whereas the earlier Black Consciousness emphasis had been on abrogating those rights ‘within the bounds of possibility’ that existed, as activists later explained the strategy.14 The rise of the UDF created a new player that the New Left generation was immediately uncomfortable with, although their influence was nonetheless felt within the community-based movement. Although Turner’s contribution had become obscured by harder-cast political activism in the trade unions, Andrew Nash nonetheless discerns Turner’s thinking as being enshrined in the strategy and organisation of FOSATU, launched in 1979, a year after Turner’s death. Particularly in the FOSATU Congress address of Joe Foster in 1982, Nash detects the distillation of Turner’s thinking as seeing practical implantation through its policy and political stance.15 With the resurgence of this wider nationalism in the 1980s, those who sought to prioritise the interests of class and the workers, distanced from the nationalist struggle, were dismissed as ‘workerist’.16 Looking into the future from the 1970s, Turner had anticipated the achievement of a progressive South Africa through the agency of the workers in the unions. What he did not anticipate was the way in which workers’ interests would be subsumed beneath the wider resurgence of populism, represented by the cross-class appeals to the ‘community’ by the UDF. Buoyed by the support of the international Anti-Apartheid Movement, the ANC stepped in to assume the leadership of the South African struggle, while its underground structures enabled the organisation to claim leadership of the quickening civil unrest that engulfed the country in the 1980s. The end of FOSATU, which had resisted close links with the ANC, in 1985, and the establishment of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), with openly close links with the ANC in the same year, signalled another aspect of this wider nationalist resurgence. On a different front, the SACP moved to reassume leadership of the Left in South Africa. In Nash’s account, Jeremy Cronin comes full circle from an impressionable student, shaped by the 1968 sit-in at the University of Cape Town, to become the SACP intellectual who, through a number of interventions, modified the theoretical content of the SACP to fit the insights of the New Left, in order to reassert an ideological dominance of the SACP. By 1990, Conclusion 227 it seemed, the SACP had successfully retaken ownership of the Left. As Mike Morris observed, after 1990, there was a ‘rapid movement into the SACP of a large grouping of leftists who traditionally were its strongest left wing critics’.17 By the end of the 1980s, as black workers took firmer control of the unions, these white unionists retreated into ‘specific policy-related areas’.18 The fortunes of Black Consciousness were also seriously undermined by this upsurge of nationalism and strategic errors on the part of its proponents. In 1981 the student wing of the Azanian People’s Organisation (AZAPO), the Azanian Students’ Organisation, broke away from AZAPO and declared its commitment to the non- racialism of the ANC, a position that gained strength particularly after the launch of the UDF. Notwitshtanding, the launch of the National Forum in June 1983 issued the Manifesto of the Azanian People, which ‘identified “racial capitalism” as the enemy and was based on four basic principles: Anti-racism, anti-imperialism, anti-collaboration with the ruling class, and independent working class organizations’.19 However, during the 1980s, AZAPO was steadily attacked and marginalised through a combination of direct violence and the emergence of what Xolela Mangcu calls a ‘boycottist’ culture in the movement that adopted a negative strategy of opposition to the initiatives of the UDF. At its lowest point, Mangcu recalls jeering crowds assembled in front of the Biko family’s Ginsberg home, chanting ‘U-Steve Biko, I- CIA! – alleging Steve had worked for the CIA’, and an escalation of violence in Port Elizabeth and Soweto between youths aligned with the UDF and AZAPO supporters.20 The cumulative sense was that Black Consciousness had had its day and that the rightful custody of the struggle had now returned to the ANC and SACP, even as activists associated with Black Consciousness continued their work in communites, helping to sustain community programmes that ‘still operate today’.21 Even at this, its lowest point, Black Consciousness continued to exert an influence that echoed its powerful role in the 1970s. One example, noted for the resonances it has for this book, is given by Beverley Naidoo. She recounts how Neil Aggett, then a young medical doctor who later became a prominent trade unionist and the first white activist to die in police detention in 1982, encountered black doctors 228 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS during his internship at Umtata General Hospital who had been part of SASO while medical students in Durban. Naidoo describes the experience as a ‘turning point’ for Aggett, as he came into contact with politically sophisticated black people, some of whom would have been his superiors.22 Thus the impact of Black Consciousness on a small minority of whites, although on the wane, continued into the 1980s. The radical Christian legacy was perhaps one of the strongest continuities from the 1970s. The launch of the Institute of Contextual Theology (ICT) was in part a symbolically defiant reversal of the acronym of the Christian Institute and its founding was intended to continue the legacy of the Christian Institute.23 The ICT provided a space to continue the theological critique of apartheid, crystallised by its issuing of the . A theological tract, it was published on 13 September 1985, the culmination of a series of consultations with theologians that had started as discussion groups in Soweto in June of that year. It took its title from a theologically powerful Greek word that denoted the critical nature of that particular historical moment. The Kairos Document pronounced that ‘the day of judgement had come’ for apartheid and that Christians consequently had a moral imperative, they were to ‘quite simply participate in the struggle for liberation’.24 Albert Nolan, formerly National Catholic Federation of Students (NCFS) chaplain, was also a participant in the ICT and in the production of the Kairos Document. The international success of his book Jesus Before Christianity (published in 1976) pointed to the wider resonances that this period of religious and political flux in South Africa had for liberation theology worldwide and thus constituted one of its enduring legacies. Furthermore, under the powerful leadership of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Beyers Naudé and Frank Chikane, the South African Council of Churches (SACC) was transformed to spearhead Christian opposition to the apartheid state. This commitment by the SACC to fundamental political change in the country led Prime Minister Botha to order a reprisal, as subsequently shown by Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. Colonel Eugene de Kock planned and carried out the bombing of the SACC headquarters at Khotso House in Johannesburg on 31 August 1988, which injured nineteen people.25 In a sense, the relevance of the 1970s continued in that the original vision from that time remained valid as a barometer of how much Conclusion 229 was still to be done in terms of creating an ‘ideally just’ society. In Durban from 1986, the memory of Turner provided something of an anchor in confusing and fast-changing times, kept alive by friends in the city who organised the Rick Turner Memorial Lectures. The lecture series lasted eleven years with some gaps, spanning the years of the transition to democracy. It seemed to provide a moral compass to the momentous changes of the 1990s. In a signal to Turner’s historic links with progressive Afrikaners, the Afrikaans political philosopher André du Toit gave the first lecture, which took place at the University of Natal, Durban, on 25 September 1986. The following year Duncan Greaves focused on ‘Richard Turner and the politics of emancipation’. Turner’s erstwhile colleague in the Department of Politics, Michael Nupen, gave a lecture in 1988 that dwelt on ‘philosophy and the crisis in South Africa’ and another colleague, Raphael de Kadt, gave the lecture the following year on ‘modernity and the future of democracy’. On 27 September 1990, Tony Morphet spoke of ‘brushing history against the grain’. Coining the term the ‘Durban Moment’, he spoke of how it had questioned the claims to civilisation and progress that underlay colonialism’s and apartheid’s modernist hubris. Morphet used the opportunity to reflect on the difficulty of what he termed ‘oppositional discourse’ in striking a balance between supporting liberation, but remaining critical of the liberation movement itself. Giving insight into the preceding decade of the 1980s, Morphet drew on two sociologists, Johan Muller and Nico Cloete, who had described the period as

hyper polarised by the immediate antagonism of ‘the State’ and the ‘the people’ where ‘the state represented the simple denial of the needs of the people’ and in which the polarized antagonism ‘had the effect of justifying absolutely the legitimacy of the struggle for liberation tout court, as well as all means of achieving it’.26

Authentic intellectuals, they observed, such as Biko and Turner, had been compromised by the demands of the political moment, and replaced by the need for ‘intellectual activism’. Ralph Lawrence (1990), a past student of Turner’s, spoke on ‘shaping democracy in a future South Africa’, implying the laying of 230 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS foundational values and structures. Elizabeth de Kadt (1991) spoke on ‘language, power and emancipation’, similarly dwelling on the base issues of communication and social relations that underlay society. Eddie Webster (1993) spoke of ‘social reconstruction’ and the loss of the moral imperative outlined in The Eye of the Needle. Ari Sitas (1995) spoke on ‘reconstruction in transformation’, again implying foundational concerns and a structure for future policy and direction. In this sense, Turner’s legacy of questioning, of returning to base values, was an abiding contribution to South Africa. David Hemson (1996) spoke to the theme of ‘Rick Turner and the politics of learning’. The last lecture, which marked something of a departure, was given in 1997 by Turner’s oldest daughter, Jann, who had returned to South Africa after 1994, determined to track down her father’s killer. Even if they did provide a sense of anchoring to the past, the memorial lectures did not last. The institutional remnants of the work of the activists in the New Left in the trade union movement remained, but their legacy has been contradictory, as subsequent controversies have made clear. In 2006 the sociologist Sakhela Buhlungu, in a debate with colleague Johann Maree, challenged the ‘renditions of the history and role of white activists in black unions’, which he sees as often ‘self- righteous and arrogant, particularly in the way they portrayed white activists as custodians of non-racialism and socialism’.27 In his original article, drawing from his experiences as a union official in the 1980s and subsequent research, Buhlungu pointed to the continued racial politics within the independent unions, as white officials ‘were never fully integrated into the class with which they had pledged solidarity’.28 It was a result, he argues, of ‘the social distance that existed between white people and black people in general [that] continued to exist between white officials, on the one hand, and black workers and officials, on the other’. This distance was compounded by the tendency of whites to see themselves as ‘intellectuals’ and the black workers only able to perform the more menial tasks of union organising. Maree’s response to Buhlungu drew a critical comparison, claiming that the unions with white union officials achieved far more than the Africanist unions who rejected their services and pointed to the caricature of white union officials that Buhlungu’s article rested upon.29 Buhlungu had also pointed to some differences in the blanket term ‘white intellectual’ and distinguished Turner as a ‘freelance Conclusion 231 intellectual’, as opposed to the white unionists that he critiqued. For Buhlungu, Turner and other freelance intellectuals had played a more constructive role, as they ‘sought to influence union traditions by playing a supportive role in the form of research, education and advocacy, [whereas white unionists] . . . sought power inside these unions’.30 The controversy between Buhlungu and Maree indicates that there was no easy solution to the initial problem raised by Biko and Black Consciousness with regard to the participation of whites in the struggle for the emancipation of black South Africans. It thus continued with the independent trade unions. The debate provided a salutary reminder that the tensions and ambivalences that underlay the relationship between Black Consciousness and progressive organisations were never fully resolved. Instead, the next generation had to negotiate similar questions with regard to their roles and how to relate across racial boundaries, indeed, how to negotiate the differential positions of power that the social system accorded them.

Post-1994 and the contribution of the 1970s The end of apartheid did not usher in the deeper social reorganisation envisioned by Turner and Biko and their generation of political activists. Rather, it signalled a forceful re-entry of South Africa’s economy into a globalised capitalist world economy, coupled with a process of denationalisation and renationalisation, as Gillian Hart observes.31 Andrew Nash saw the post-1994 dispensation as the effective death of what he terms ‘the Moment of Western Marxism’, arguing that it was betrayed by many of its original proponents.32 Like those in the Left, the students nursed in the radical circles of the 1970s betrayed the ideals that had informed their early activism, Nash argues. In this sense, the ideas of Turner and his generation, encapsulated by an appeal to democratic socialism, were jettisoned by those in the mainstream of realpolitik for democratic capitalism. Black Consciousness was relegated to a backseat, discredited in part by the ‘boycottist’ stance of organisations such as AZAPO that claimed heir to Biko’s philosophy. Furthermore, it appears now that there was an implicit assumption that Black Consciousness was redundant with the electoral victory of African nationalism in 1994 and was made further unfashionable as Mandela and Tutu proclaimed the advent of the ‘’ post- 1994. 232 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

Moving to the present day, it is immediately clear how wrong it was to dismiss the ideals of the activists of the 1970s. As disillusionment with the ANC has built and as the rhetoric of the national democratic revolution has become more clichéd, many are looking back to Black Consciousness and to the ideas of the 1970s. Using the ‘Durban Moment’ as a foil, the sociologist Karl von Holdt describes South Africa as being in the middle of what he calls the ‘Johannesburg Moment’. Whereas the previous Moment was informed by clear traditions of thought (the New Left, Black Conciousness and radical Christianity have been identified here), Von Holdt observes that the present moment is characterised by a ‘fractious and turbulent set of social contestations’ best characterised as ‘multiple local moral orders, a social fragmentation, a rupturing of order, a profound disordering of society’.33 If Turner’s memorial lecture series served as a focal point to cohere around in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Steve Biko Memorial Lecture has similarly garnered attention in the post-apartheid era since 2000, facilitated by the work of the Steve Biko Foundation launched by Biko’s son, Nkosinathi Biko. As opposed to the comparatively obscure academics who presented the Turner Memorial Lectures, a juxtaposition of the two memorial lecture series serves to emphasise Biko’s meteoric rise to become an ‘illustrious son of the soil’ of Africa, as Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o called him,34 and an icon of the global black struggle, with luminaries such as Chinua Achebe, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and most recently Angela Davis, presenting the lectures. Fittingly, the first Steve Biko Memorial Lecture was given by Pro- fessor Njabulo Ndebele, who used the occasion to reflect on the condition of South Africa, six years into its democracy, using the memory and philosophy of Biko as his moral sounding board, specifically speaking to the continued reality of racism. Professor Zakes Mda (2001) spoke of ‘Biko’s children’, a new generation of ‘young men and women from marginalised communities who are using the arts to understand the nature of oppression . . . and to liberate themselves from it’.35 In them, Mda sees the militant and radical generation of the 1970s rebirthed. Professor Chinua Achebe (2002) pointed to the significance of South Africa for Africa as a continent Conclusion 233 and to Biko as one star in a glittering array of struggle icons who had given inspiration to Africans as far afield as his country of Nigeria. Wa Thiong’o continued the theme and spoke of the importance of South Africa as part of a ‘global project’ to recover African intellectual works.36 Mandela (2004) used the occasion to celebrate ten years of South African democracy and in a mark of conciliation emphasised the importance of Biko’s contribution to ‘the reawakening of the people’.37 Dr Mamphela Ramphele (2005) evoked the spirit of responsibility present in Black Consciousness to affirm ‘citizenship as stewardship’.38 Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu (2005) simply reminded the audience that ‘the best memorial to Steve Biko would be a South Africa where everyone respects themselves, has a positive self-image filled with proper self-esteem, and holds others in high regard’. 39 Giving the eighth memorial lecture, an occasion given added significance as the 30th anniversary of Biko’s death, former president wove a narrative that placed Biko into the broader landscape of South African and international black struggles.40 Former finance minister (2008) spoke of the importance of activists who organised the ubiquitous ‘communities’ of the 1980s conducting ‘first- level conscientisation’.41 While Biko has been unanimously embraced at this illustrious level, Black Consciousness has been used at a more popular level as a discomforting corrective to the euphoric multiracialism of ‘new’ South African nation-building.42 In the cauldron of frustrated dreams and visibly vast disparities in wealth, Biko and Black Consciousness even became ‘dynamic signifiers simultaneously used both to mark out political distance from [former president Jacob] Zuma and the ANC and to try to legitimate a ruling party, and its leader, in increasing crisis’, as the public intellectual Richard Pithouse has observed.43 A new generation of black activists and intellectuals have interpreted Biko for themselves, expressing pessimism about the sincerity of those who seek to ‘interpret’ Biko for them. Biko’s writings have helped to inspire new social movements such as the shackdwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo and a broader critique of the political impasse as Nigel Gibson has shown.44 The memory of Biko has become highly contested as testified to by the brief but acrimonious debate in the pages of the Mail & Guardian in 2012 between Biko’s biographer Xolela Mangcu and 234 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

Black First Land First activist and former Economic Freedom Fighter (EFF) MP, Andile Mngxitama. The sting in the debate hinged on Mngxitma’s scorn of Mangcu’s emphasis of Biko’s Xhosa upbringing and indebtedness to the community of Ginsberg, and a comparison to Mandela that Mngxitama felt robbed Biko of his radicalism, providing an ‘attempt to recruit Biko to Mandela’s political process’, resulting in ‘a vulgarisation of Biko’s ideas’.45 Mangcu retorted with a pointed rejection of Mngxitama’s ‘sophistry’, characterising him as a ‘master of deceit’ and proceeded to quote from Biko, where he attested to the importance of historical Xhosa figures in his consciousness and his respect for Mandela.46 The evidence drawn from this book tends to support Mangcu’s position that Biko owed much to his upbringing and sought to promote unity in a way that anticipated Mandela’s role. That is not to collapse Biko into Mandela, as the differences between the two men are historical fact, as attested to in the introduction to this book.

Looking back This book has explored more closely the historical context of Black Consciousness and taken its own claims to importance more seriously than have many observers and critics. Black Consciousness has emerged as a powerful contribution to a South African dialogue about what constitutes an authentic citizen in a modern nation-state. This book confirms Julian Brown’s emphasis on the significance of ‘ongoing dialogue’ in the period before the Soweto Uprising, but on a range that Brown does not systematically engage with – radical Christian, feminist, socialist, liberal – all were influences that the Black Consciousness Movement had to define itself against and in dialogue with.47 The government repression of the 1960s created a distinct gap in progressive party politics. The exile of the African nationalist organisations and the disbanding of the Liberal Party facilitated a grassroots political engagement that took inspiration from international democratic struggles. Black Consciousness emphasised the importance of black pride or ‘beingness’, personal fulfilment and growth, as a more meaningful and rational basis for a future South African society. While Biko recognised racial difference in terms of historical experience, he still held out the possibility for a future synthesis, achieved through Black Consciousness, which would be an authentic resolution to the Conclusion 235 reality of white racism and colonialism. Strict ideological orthodoxy was tempered by his more pragmatic openness to avenues for meaningful change. What Biko’s memory does not immediately make apparent is that in its historical moment, Black Consciousness could be tempered by open engagement between black and white activists, that reasoning, searching and dialogue were paradoxically maintained together with the necessity of temporary political polarisation. No doubt, Black Consciousness bore the personal imprint of its key intellectual and political leader and there were those less disposed to such open engagement, but the strength of the Black Consciousness message during its historical moment was also the result of its ability to convert and because its message resonated with the utopian hopes of radical Christians and socialists. A call to maturity, personal growth and a qualified openness was inherent in the political vision of the leaders of Black Consciousness, for whom the ideas were more of ‘a way of being’ than a political orthodoxy, and in which personal liberation necessarily preceded political freedom. We have seen the importance of the modernisation of religion in the 1960s and that political concerns with the oppression of the ‘Third World’ were important currency in church circles. In the ecumenical movement, greater membership by churches from the developing world pushed the World Council of Churches to a stronger stance on social justice issues. The political circumstances in South Africa, after the African national organisations were forced underground and into exile in the 1960s, ensured that black aspirations were channelled through what means were available, particularly Christian student organisations. These organisations at segregated universities and seminaries provided spaces for black students to meet and discuss their ideas. Black Consciousness fitted closely into the deep and powerful contestation over religious belief present in South Africa from the arrival of missionaries. Like the Christian student organisations, the de facto segregated seminaries were significant spaces in which Black Consciousness ideas took root. The emergence of Black Theology as a complementary discourse sought to address the particular concerns of the black clergy and laity, but also provided the ideological resource necessary to sustain personal sacrifices for the political struggle to 236 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS end apartheid. Radical Christians working with the Christian Institute provided another source of support for activists, as well as an alternative context that linked into progressive movements worldwide. The close relationship with Black Consciousness helped the leaders of the Christian Institute to move towards a more radical position and accept the political leadership of black people. The confidence in white political custodianship that had characterised the Study Project on Christianity in Apartheid Society (SPRO-CAS) reports gave way to this realisation. This book has thus confirmed Daniel Magaziner’s emphasis on the religious element of Black Consciousness,48 similarly pointing to how the Movement emerged from the womb of religious organisations, as we saw Barney Pityana remark in the introduction, but it has also pointed to the Movement’s much wider resonances with secular ideologies. Black Consciousness emerged out of this set of relationships, which the focus of the SASO activists’ early rhetoric attested to. The Christianity of black students and black leaders needed reformulation to be relevant; ecumenism and its assumed multiracialism lacked political direction. SASO sought to distance itself from NUSAS and the wider cause of student solidarity and it looked to chart its own course. Class and gender (particularly women’s liberation) were potentially undermining conceptual distractions from the ‘true’ cause and the ‘correct’ perspective, the liberation from racial self-hate and racial oppression. In their utilisation of city spaces, activists maintained communication that held to a common political vision facilitated by the logic of ecumenical endeavour. The SASO and Black People’s Convention offices in Durban, Beatrice Street, or at the university’s Medical School; the University Christian Movement offices in Jorissen Street, Johannesburg, for a few years in the early 1970s; in Cape Town, at the Mowbray Centre – all were spaces utilised by Black Consciousness activists. In this way, they constituted radical spaces, through their interrelationships, which formed the basis of both their existential, cultural and political disagreements and consensuses about the political solution and future of South Africa. When SASO broke from NUSAS, the white liberal leaders searched for an alternative form of politics. The arrival of Turner on the scene Conclusion 237 in 1966 and the articulate challenge of Biko, Pityana and other SASO leaders, facilitated a rethinking of white students’ political role. In response to the injunction that they could only assist the black struggle, white students turned their attention to activities such as the poverty datum line research and wages commissions across the country. The early confidence that saw NUSAS president Duncan Innes claim South Africa as ‘our country, our responsibility’ was replaced with a challenge, as formulated by Turner, and Biko in a different way, to prove their identity through their ethical choices and through their political commitment. Although the rhetorical force of Black Consciousness discourse was levelled against white liberal interference, this did not summarily end all contact or prevent fruitful dialogue. But despite their personal friendships, Biko and SASO responded warily to attempts by whites to join the black struggle. In the early 1970s black students had expended a great deal of intellectual labour clarifying their correct focus. At the same time as dialogue with other activists was a stimulating source of new ideas, black activists fought to keep focus. While they embraced the fashions of black America, with their speech interspersed with Americanisms, SASO responded more critically to a wider exultant mood of amorphous freedom and mounted an intellectual critique and rejection of the more challenging implications of feminism. These conclusions indicate that Black Consciousness was a compelling product of the ‘lull’ in above-ground political activity of the 1960s. Whether admitted or not, white liberals were more than the enemy left behind. They refused to be dismissed into complete irrelevance. As a product of South African civil society, Black Consciousness was also a discourse of broader social, philosophical and theological implications. It grew in the churches, was embraced by radical Christians and was endorsed by leading black Christian leaders. It is apparent that the importance, and salience, of Black Consciousness is because of the abiding resonances it holds in South Africa and with the powerful movements of social change of the post-war world. Thus Black Consciousness was the fruit of the intellectual labour of blacks alone, but it was also a political body of ideas that arose out of a political context that was shaped by many forces, emanating from both white and black sources. 238 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

Notes . 1 M. Lobban, White Man’s Justice: South African Political Trials in the Black Consciousness Era (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 249. See also the discussion in S. Johnson, ‘ “The Soldiers of Luthuli”: Youth in the Politics of Resistance in South Africa’ in South Africa: No Turning Back, ed. S. Johnson (London: Macmillan, 1988), 94–154. 2. A shorter version of this chapter appeared originally as I. Macqueen, ‘Class versus Nation: A History of Richard Turner’s Eclipse and Resurgence’, Theoria 64, no. 2 (2017): 39–49. 3. A. van Heerden, ‘Wiehahn Commission’ (n.d), 29. http://www. sahistory.org.za/sites/default/files/DC/spe19791100.026.022.000/ spe19791100.026.022.000.pdf. 4. S. Dubow, Apartheid, 1958–1994 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 198. 5. Cited in B. Keniston, Choosing to be Free: The Life Story of Rick Turner (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2013), 130. 6. J. Maree, ‘Against the Odds: The Sustainability of the South African Labour Bulletin’, Transformation 72/73 (2010): 51–2. 7. Keniston, Choosing to be Free, 183–6. 8. Maree, ‘Against the Odds’, 52. 9. X. Mangcu, Biko: A Biography (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2012), 289. 10. A. Nash, ‘The Moment of Western Marxism in South Africa’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 19, no. 1 (1999): 66–81. 11. Ari Sitas, interview, Cape Town, 6 February 2014. 12. Chipkin, Do South Africans Exist? 13. T. Lodge, B. Nasson, et al. (eds.), All, Here, and Now: Black Politics in South Africa in the 1980s (Cape Town, David Philip 1991), 49 – 51. See also J. Seekings, The UDF: A History of the United Democratic Front in South Africa, 1983–1991 (Cape Town: David Philip; Oxford: James Currey; Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2000). 14. B. Pityana, M. Ramphele, M. Mpumlwana and L. Wilson, eds, Bounds of Possibility: The Legacy of Steve Biko and Black Consciousness (Cape Town: David Philip, 1991). 15. Nash, ‘The Moment of Western Marxism in South Africa’, 70-1. 16. I. Chipkin, Do South Africans Exist? Nationalism, Democracy and the Identity of ‘the People’ (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2007), 88. 17. Cited in Nash, ‘Moment of Western Marxism’, 77. 18. S. Buhlungu, ‘Rebels without a Cause of Their Own? The Contradictory Location of White Officials in Black Unions in South Africa, 1973–94’, Current Sociology 54, no. 3 (2006): 442. Conclusion 239

19. N.C. Gibson, Black Consciousness 1977–1987: The Dialectics of Liberation in South Africa, Centre for Civil Society Research Report No. 18 (Durban: Centre for Civil Society, 2004), 16. 20. Mangcu, Biko, 294–5. 21. L. Hadfield, Liberation and Development: Black Consciousness Community Programs in South Africa (Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 2016), 157. 22. B. Naidoo, Death of an Idealist: In Search of Neil Aggett (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2012), 74. 23. James Cochrane, e-mail to Philippe Denis, 4 Mach 2013. My thanks to Philippe Denis for sharing this correspondence with me. See also J.R. Cochrane, ‘Questioning Contextual Theology’, in Towards an Agenda for Contextual Theology: Essays in Honour of Albert Nolan, ed. M.T. Speckman and L.T. Kaufmann (Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 2001), 67–86. 24. Kairos Document, 1985, http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/kairos- document-1985-0. 25. ‘Khotso House is Bombed’, http://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/ khotso-house-bombed. 26. T. Morphet, ‘Brushing History against the Grain: Oppositional Discourse in South Africa’, Theoria 76 (October 1990): 97. 27. S. Buhlungu, ‘Whose Cause and Whose History? A Response to Maree’, Current Sociology 54, no. 3 (2006): 470. 28. Buhlungu, ‘Rebels without a Cause’, 435. 29. J. Maree, ‘Rebels with Causes: White Officials in Black Trade Unions in South Africa, 1973–94: A Response to Sakhela Buhlungu’, Current Sociology 54, no. 3 (2006): 453–67. 30. Buhlungu, ‘Rebels without a Cause’, 444. 31. G. Hart, Rethinking the South African Crisis: Nationalism, Populism, Hegemony (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2013). 32. Nash, ‘Moment of Western Marxism’. 33. K. von Holdt, ‘Prologue’, in Conversations with Bourdieu: The Johannesburg Moment, ed. M. Burawoy and K. von Holdt (Johannesburg: Wits University Press; 2012), 2. 34. The Steve Biko Foundation, The Steve Biko Memorial Lectures 2000–2008 (Johannesburg: The Steve Biko Foundation and Macmillan, 2009), 52. 35. Steve Biko Foundation, Memorial Lectures, 36. 36. Steve Biko Foundation, Memorial Lectures, 67. 37. Steve Biko Foundation, Memorial Lectures, 75. 38. Steve Biko Foundation, Memorial Lectures, 80–92. 39. Steve Biko Foundation, Memorial Lectures, 99. 40. Steve Biko Foundation, Memorial Lectures, 102–22. 240 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

41. Steve Biko Foundation, Memorial Lectures, 139. 42. A. Mngxitama, ‘We Need to Break Free of Stranglehold of White Revolutionaries’, Sowetan, 23 February 2010. http://www.sowetan.co.za/ Columnists/AndileMnxitama/Article.aspx?id=1116868. 43. R. Pithouse, ‘Review of L. Hadfield, Liberation and Development: Black Consciousness Community Programs in South Africa’, American Historical Review 122, no. 3 (2017): 969–97. 44. N.C. Gibson, Fanonian Practices in South Africa: From Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 45. A. Mngxitama, ‘Biko Biography Found Wanting’, Mail & Guardian, 5 October 2012. https://mg.co.za/article/2012-10-05-biko-biography-found-wanting. 46. X. Mangcu, ‘Mngxitama’s “Design to Deceive” ’, Mail & Guardian, 12 October 2012. https://mg.co.za/article/2012-10-12-00-mngxitamas- design-to-deceive. 47. J. Brown, The Road to Soweto: Resistance and the Uprising of 16 June 1976 (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2016), 183. 48. D. Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968–1977 (Athens: Ohio University Press; Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2010). Select Bibliography 241

Select Bibliography

Archives Alan Paton Centre, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg Aluka Digital Archive Digital Imaging South Africa Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg Institute of Commonwealth Studies Library, London Killie Campbell Africana Library, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban Richard Turner Papers, E.G. Malherbe Library, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban South African History Online Special Collections, J.W. Jagger Building, University of Cape Town, Cape Town

Interviews Badsha, Omar, Cape Town, 1 February 2014 Cooper, Saths, Johannesburg, 21 January 2014 Dubbeld, Gijs, Durban, 9 August 2008 Kaplinsky, Raphael, Brighton, England, 11 August 2009 Kleinschmidt, Horst, Grahamstown, 22 February 2013 Maré, Gerhard, Durban, 13 August 2008 Marie, Bobby, Johannesburg, 15 February 2013 Moodie, Dunbar, Johannesburg, 15 February 2013 Morphet, Tony, Cape Town, 12 May 2010 Naidoo, Phyllis, Durban, 29 April 2010 Shandu, Jackie, telephone interview, 18 February 2014 Sitas, Ari, Cape Town, 6 February 2014 Trumbull, David, Skype interview, 2 June 2010 Trumbull, Howard, Skype interview, 4 June 2010 Turner-Stylianou, Foszia, Johannesburg, 22 November 2014 Webster, Eddie, Johannesburg, 11 April 2014

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Index

Abahlali baseMjondolo 233 Association for the Educational Abe Bailey Institute conference (Cape and Cultural Advancement of Town, 1971) 10, 77, 78, 79, 90, African People of South Africa 109, 110, 186, 206 (ASSECA) 144, 145 Abram, Gees 143 Attwell, K. 207, 208 academic freedom 15, 60, 65, 66, 70 Azanian People’s Organisation Achebe, Chinua 232–3 (AZAPO) 214, 227, 231 African National Congress (ANC) 5, Azanian Students’ Organisation 6, 7, 23, 27, 139, 149, 157, 169, (AZASO) 214, 227 208, 222, 225, 226, 227, 232, 237 Baartman, Elias 189 Afrikaanse Studentebond 77, 206 Badsha, Omar 108–9, 122, 125 Afrikaner left (verligtes) 63, 92 n.26, Ballinger, Margaret 101 175 Bambani, Victor 72 Aggett, Neil 227–8 banned persons 126, 127–8, 213 Alan Taylor Residence (University of Bantu Education 16, 17, 25–6, 49, Natal Medical School) 73, 81–2, 84, 86 103, 105, 116, 119, 147, 204 Bantu Women’s League 139 Alice Declaration (1972) 85 Bantustans 16–17, 27, 82, 112, 149, Althusser, Louis 128 152, 223 American University Christian Barmen Declaration of the German Movement 37–8 Confessing Church (1934) 172 Amos, Winston 72 Barry, Des 30 Anglican Students’ Federation (ASF) Batson, Edward 122 28, 29, 31, 33, 34, 39, 40, 46–7, Beall, Jo 3 48, 89 Beatrice Street (Durban) 8, 9–10, 103, Anti-Apartheid Movement 226 150, 185, 236 apartheid 24, 26, 30–1, 87, 172–3, Bell, Trevor 179 190, 191 Biko, Khaya 32, 33, 34, 209 Aquarius (NUSAS culture affiliate) 80 Biko, Nkosinathi 232 Arnold, Millard 206–7 Biko, Ntsiki 146

257 258 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

Biko, Stephen Bantu social life 145 and African society 116 and SPRO-CAS 174 banning 106, 126, 128, 182–3, 222 and white liberals and radicals 10, and black solidarity 112–13, 114, 11, 18, 40, 43–4, 49, 73, 75, 78, 116 80, 96 n.95, 110–11, 113, 116–17, CIA links alleged 227 118–19, 237 detention without trial 33 and women 106–7, 143–4, 145, 146, and the ‘Durban Moment’ 128–9 150, 159, 160 early years 32–3 writing and speeches 43–4, 78, 79, and integration 4, 44, 78, 115, 234–5 106, 112, 115, 145, see also ‘Frank interviewed by Gail Gerhart 8, 9, Talk’ 16, 105 Black Allied Workers’ Union 126 in King William’s Town 158–9, 165, Black Community Programmes (BCP) 182–3, 211 2, 8, 9, 158, 159, 165, 181, 182, as leader 1, 105–6, 108, 211–12, 215 213 legacy 215, 222, 232–4 Black Consciousness and masculinity 141, 143–4, 145 and ANC 6, 7, 208, 224–5 as medical student 40, 99, 103, banning of organisations and 108–9 individuals 12, 126, 212–13 murder and funeral 211–12, and black solidarity 87, 111, 126, 213–14, 222 152 personality 106–7 and class 111–12 relationship with Innes 73, 74, 90 and colonialism and apartheid 5, 14, relationship with Naudé 166, 167 16–17, 24, 112, 207 relationship with Pityana 32, 33, 40, and community involvement 7, 12, 78 112, 119–20, 159, 207–8, 227 relationship with Ramphele 107, 138, 146, 159 comparisons with Afrikaner relationship witn Stubbs 34, 209, nationalism 77, 79 210, 211–12 definition of black 14, 17, 24, 43, relationship with Turner 11, 18, 99, 156 110, 113, 115, 116–17, 120, 129, and the ‘Durban Moment’ 128–9 134 n.82, 209 and empowerment and relationship with Woods 11, 182, psychological liberation 4, 6–7, 183 14, 58, 83, 111–12, 134–5 n.102, and religion 32, 33, 34, 40, 44–5, 141–2, 190, 212, 214, 234–5 117 government interpretation of 89 and SASO 40, 77, 150, 184, 202, and integration 83, 112 206 international influences and and SASO Nine trial 18–19, 128, comparisons 5, 6, 9, 79, 234, 203, 206–8, 209 237 Index 259

legacy and contemporary relevance Boshoff, J.C. 85 1, 7–8, 19, 222, 227–8, 231, 232, Botha, M.C. 70 233, 234 Botha, P.W. 228 and masculinity 141–2, 145 Braamfontein (Johannesburg) 185, 236 and progressive movements 2–3, Brenninkmeijer, Hans 63 10–11, 12, 13 Breytenbach, Breyten 62, 203, 218 n.15 and race 4, 14, 112–13 Brink, André 62 and religion 14, 17, 24–5, 29, 37, Brookes, Edgar 77, 101, 174 39, 44, 48, 49, 166, 174, 182, 183, Brown, Jennifer 74 189, 190, 192, 193, 209, 213, 214, Brown, Julian 2, 58, 124 228, 234, 235–6, 237 Brown, Peter 101 slogans and symbols 7, 207 Buhlungu, Sakhela 230–1 and white liberals and radicals 2, 9, Burnett, Bill 168, 171, 172, 173 10, 16, 17, 79, 120, 121, 129, 153, Butelezi, Peter 190 165, 166, 188, 189, 192, 231, 234, Buthelezi, J.B. 124 235, 237 Buthelezi, Manas 187–9, 203, 216 and women 9, 17, 18, 107, 138, 139, Buthelezi, Mangosuthu 101, 109, 125, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 144, 147 152–3, 154, 156–7, 158, 159–60, Buthelezi, Sipho 185 160 n.4, 234, 236, 237 and workers 126 Cabral, Amílcar 6, 105 Black Panthers 83, 147 Cape Times 177, 178 Black People’s Convention (BPC) 126, capitalism 87, 123, 179, 191, 215, 227, 145, 184–5, 204, 205, 206, 208, 231 211, 213, 214, 236 Cardijn, Joseph 123 Black Power (Charles Hamilton and Carmichael, Stokely 6, 183 Stokely Carmichael) 6 Carnegie Commission 175 Black Review 106, 120 Catholic Church 64, 114, 122, 189–90 Black Sash 153, 155 censorship 39, 41–2, 58–9 Black Theology 11, 18, 38–9, 44, 45, Césaire, Aimé 78 46, 49, 114, 129, 179, 189, 190, Charter for Women (1971) 155 235–6 Cheadle, Halton 74, 122, 123, 125, Black Women’s Federation (BWF) 151 215, 224 Black Workers’ Council 126 Chikane, Frank 172, 195 n.48, 225, Black Workers’ Project 185 228 Bodibeng High School (Maokeng, Chipkin, Ivor 4 Kroonstad) 7 Christian Aid 173 Boesak, Allan 225 Christian Council of South Africa Bolton, Harriet 123, 125 (CCSA) 23, 167–8, see also South Boshoff, Judge 206 African Council of Churches 260 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

Christian Education and Leadership Cook, Calvin 172 Training (CELT) 28–9 Cooper, Saths 79–80, 102, 126, 202 Christian Institute 10, 11, 18, 31, 89, Copelyn, John 125, 224 155, 165–6, 167, 168, 170, 171, Coronation Brick and Tile (Durban) 172, 173, 174, 176, 181, 182, 183, 124 184, 185, 186, 187–8, 189, 191, Costa, Ken 76 192–3, 213, 222, 228, 236 Cottesloe consultation (Johannesburg, Christian student organisations 25, 28, 1960) 23–4, 167, 171 29, 30–1, 35–6, 45–8, 57, 235 counter-culture 59, 103, 111 Cindi, Zithulele 202 Cronin, Jeremy 65, 226 cities 25, 100–1, 141, 175 Cry Freedom (film) 11 Clarence, N.D. 216 Currie’s Fountain (Durban) 201, 202 class analysis 116, 118, 119 Curtis, Jeanette 122 The Classic 120 Curtis, Neville 11, 18, 75, 76, 81, 87, Cloete, Nico 229 90, 127, 186–7 Collier, Mark 167 Collins, Colin 36, 48 Davies, John 172 Coloured community 177 Davis, Angela 147, 159, 232 Commission of Inquiry into Certain Davis, David 122 Organisations (Schlebusch, 1972) De Beer, David 210 89, 127, 176, 188, 191–2, 211 De Gruchy, John 171 Commission of Inquiry on Labour De Kadt, Elizabeth 230 Legislation (Wiehahn, 1977) De Kadt, Raphael 109, 229 222–3 De Kiewiet, C.W. 78 Commission of Inquiry on Manpower De Klerk, Jan 65 Legislation (Riekert, 1979) 223 De Klerk, W.A. 176–7, 178 Cone, James 38, 39 Conference on Church and Society De Kock, Eugene 4, 228 (Geneva, 1966) 171–2 De Tocqueville, Alexis 78 Conference on Women (Nairobi, De Villiers, Bruckner 31, 153, 155, 1985) 149 170, 173 Congress of Democrats 140 De Wet, J.M. 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72 Congress of South African Students Degenaar, Johan 63 214 Desmond, Cosmas 168, 184, 210 Congress of South African Trade detention without trial 33, 75, 202 Unions (COSATU) 226 Diakonia (Durban) 185, 215 Congress of the People (COPE) 8 The Discarded People (Cosmas Connery, Didacus (Diego) 29, 36, 48 Desmond) 168 conscientious objection 190–1 Dissent 128 Consultation on Racism (London, Dlamini, Jacob 3–4 1969) 169 Douwes-Dekker, Loet 123 Index 261

Driver, Dorothy 157 Federation of South African Trade Driver, Jonty 61, 146 Unions (FOSATU) 225, 226 Du Bois, W.E.B. 42 Federation of South African Women Du Toit, André 229 (FEDSAW) 139 Duarte, Jessie 151 Fick, Johan 77, 206 Dunne, Tim 128 Fisher, Foszia (Turner-Stylianou) 110, Durban 116, 125, 127, 224 and alternative lifestyles 103 Foster, Joe 226 ‘Moment’ (1970–1974) 18, 99–101, ‘Frank Talk’ (Stephen Biko) 106, 115, 102, 128–9, 225, 229, 232 118, 209 municipal elections (1977) 216 Fransman, Martin 175–6 native administration 101 Freedom Charter 174 and segregation 102, 103–4 Freire, Paulo 7, 29 stevedores 123–4 FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de strikes (1973) 1, 18, 100, 124–6, Moçambique) 169 128, 222 FRELIMO rallies (1974) 201–2, 211 workers 122 Friedman, Steven 113 Dutch Reformed churches 24 Fugard, Athol 71 Dwane, Sigqibo 47, 56 n.123 Gandhi, Mahatma 102, 140, 183 Eastern Cape 32, 182 Gandhi, Manilal 101 ecumenical churches 168, 170–1, 235 Garvey, Marcus 6 Ecumenical Lay Training Centre Gauntlett, Jeremy 47 (Edendale, Pietermaritzburg) 144 Gerhart, Gail 7 Edgar, Robert 14 Geyser, Albert 31 Eiselen, Werner 26 Gordimer, Nadine 157 Engelbrecht, Ben 31, 172, 173 Ensor, Paula 106–7, 122, 127 Greaves, Duncan 229 Erwin, Alec 125 Gurr, Robert 206, 208 Extension of University Education Gwala, Mafika Pascal 120–1 Act (1959) 15 The Eye of the Needle (Rick Turner) Hadfield, Leslie 2 109–10, 113, 120-1, 122, Halisi, C.R.D. 15 135 n.103, 176, 177–8, 230 Haroun, Hadjee Abdullah 168 Harris, John 27 Falkenberg, Randy 40 Harris, Peter 71 Fanon, Frantz 4, 6, 42, 43, 78, 105, Hayes, Stephen 46–7, 210 134 n.83 Hegelian dialectic 112–13 Federal Theological Seminary of Hemson, David 74, 122, 123–4, 125, Southern Africa (FEDSEM) 34, 230 67, 71, 85, 143 Hill, Shannen 2 262 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

Holmes, Dr 70 Keegan, Clive 127, 210 Holst, Reinier 213 Kennedy, Robert 59 homelands see Bantustans Kenney, Rufus 176 Honest to God (John Robinson) 30 Kgware, Bob 37, 38 Hope, Anne 28–9 Khoapa, Ben 43, 106, 144, 165, 181, Hubbard, Barbara 62, 146 210 Hudson, Peter 128 Khotso House bombing (1988) 228 Hughes, Ken 66, 93 n.42 Khumalo, Thizi 216, 217 Hurley, Denis 33–4, 185, 216, 217 King, Edward 86 King William’s Town 211 ideological ecumenism 10, 11, 12 Kirkwood, Mike 100 Ilanga lase Natal 147 Kleinschmidt, Horst 165, 181, 183, Indian community 102, 140, 177 184 inequality 1, 8, 112, 114, 237 Koka, Drake 126 Innes, Duncan 11, 18, 69, 70–1, 72, Kotze, Theo 86 73, 74, 75, 87, 90, 146, 237 Kraai, Nomsisi 142 Institute for Industrial Education Kruger, Jimmy 201, 212 (IIE) 18, 125, 224 Kuper, Leo 101, 180 Institute of Contextual Theology Kuzwayo, Ellen 144, 145, 150, 156–7 (ICT) 228 KwaZulu 101 Inter-Denominational African Ministers Association of South Labour Party 109, 112 Africa (IDAMASA) 144, 145 Lamola, M. John 112, 113 Intersem 63 Lapinsky, Sheila 61, 127 Irish, Deon 76 Lawrence, Ralph 229–30 Isacowitz, Jock 101 Le Roux, Philippe 127, 128 Israelites 32 Leftwich, Adrian 27, 61 Legassick, Martin 61, 122, 180 Jamba, Hope 72 Lekhela, Tshepo 72 Jesus 114, 190, 191 Lekota, Mosiuoa 8, 202 Johannesburg College of Education Letters and Papers from Prison (Dietrich 70 Bonhoeffer) 29–30 Johnston, Bill 47 Liberal Party 59–60, 101–2, 234 Johnstone, F.A. 180 liberation theology 192, 228 Joseph, Helen 140 Lipset, Seymour Martin 79, 80 literacy 26 Kairos Document 228 Lovedale 32, 33, 209 Kaplinsky, Raphael 64, 65 Luthuli, Albert 174 Katutura (NCFS) 30–1, 48 Luyt, Richard 65 Kearney, Paddy 185 Index 263

Mabusela, Simon 72 Mda, Zakes 232 Mafeje, Archie 64–6, 69 Meer, Fatima 102, 151 Mafole, Tomeka 106 A Message to the People of South Africa Mafuna, Bokwe 126 (SACC, 1968) 172–3 Magaziner, Daniel 1, 4, 37, 141, 236 metanoia 167 Magrath, Oswin 63, 92 n.29, 189 mission-based schools 25, 26, 33 Magubane, Bernard 180 M.L. Sultan Technical College 85 Maimela, Mabel 2 Mngxitama, Andile 234 Les Mains Sales (Jean-Paul Sartre) 29 Modisane, Jerry 85, 86, 90, 126, 210 Malherbe, E.G. 101 Moerane, M.T. 43 Mandela, Nelson 5–6, 28, 32, 174, Mohapi, Mapetla 211 211, 224–5, 231, 232, 233, 234 Mokoape, Aubrey 202 Mandela, Winnie 151 Mokoditoa, Chris 185 Manganyi, Chabani 120, 141 Mokoena, Aubrey 86, 225 Mangcu, Xolela 233–4 Moloto, Justice 8, 210 Mangena, Mosibudi 42, 105, 184, 185 Molteno, Donald 101 Manifesto of the Azanian People Monyai, Elias 189 (National Forum, 1983) 227 Moodie, Dunbar 100 Manuel, Trevor 233 Moodley, Strini 102, 126, 202 Marcuse, Herbert 176 Moore, Basil 36–7, 38–9, 40, 44, 45, Maree, Johann 230, 231 46, 48, 49, 210 Marie, Bobby 185 Moore, Shirley 154, 155 Marxism 1, 177, 218 n.15, 224, 231 morality 114 masculinity 140–1 Moravians 167 Masekela, Daphne 142, 152–3, 154, Morphet, Tony 62, 99, 124, 135 n.103, 155 215, 216, 217, 229 Mashalaba, Vuyelwa 17, 42, 142, 143, Morris, Mike 227 144 Morton, Sheila 154, 155 Mashinini, Emma 156 Moss, Glenn 2, 75, 87 Matanzima, Kaiser 147 Motlhabi, Mokgethi 185 Matshoba, Deborah 17, 138, 139, 142, Moulder, James 37, 40 144, 147, 148, 149–50, 151–2, Mowbray Centre (Cape Town) 236 156, 159 Mphahlele, Madala 43 Matthews, Z.K. 32 Mpumlwana, Malusi 104, 106, 119 Maxeke, Charlotte 139 Msimang, Selby 101 Mayson, Cedric 167, 213 Mtintso, Thenjiwe 142, 148, 158–9, Mbeki, Thabo 233 165 McCann, Owen 189–90 Mtungwa, Gloria 157–8 McDermott, Timothy 63 Mukuka, George 189 McManus, Ninian 63 Muller, André 175–6 264 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

Muller, Johan 229 New Left 15, 48, 58, 129, 224, 225, Murphy, Mike 224 226, 227, 230 Murray, Andy 71 Ngubane, Ben 103 music 59 Nhlapo, Mavis 149 Myeza, Muntu 202 Nhlapo, Welile 106 Mzoneli, Chris 179 Nkomo, Nkwenkwe 202, 205 Nkondo, G.M. 84 Naidoo, Beverley 227–8 Nkrumah, Kwame 42 Naidoo, M.J. 216 Nolan, Albert 48, 63, 191, 192, 228 Naidoo, Phyllis 127 Nolutshungu, Sam 9 Namibia 30, 46–7, 210 Ntsebenza, J. 72 Nash, Andrew 203, 218 n.15, 226, 231 Ntwasa, Sabelo Stanley 39, 210 Natal Indian Congress (NIC) 102, 109 Nupen, Charles 122, 216, 217 National Catholic Federation of Nupen, Michael 109, 229 Students (NCFS) 11, 28, 29, NUSED (NUSAS education affiliate) 30–1, 39, 40, 45, 46, 47–8, 49, 63, 80 89, 128, 191–2, 199 n.121 NUSWEL (NUSAS social welfare National Committee for Liberation affiliate) 80, 122 (NCL) 27 Nxasana, Bhekisisa 125 National Consultation on Church and Nyerere, Julius 116 Society (Johannesburg, 1968) 172 National Forum 227 O’Leary, Joan 155–6 National Party 9, 23, 24, 26, 36, 60, O’Meara, Dan 224 110, 175, 203 Oosthuizen, Daantjie 68 National Union of South African Orkin, Mark 70 Students (NUSAS) 8, 9, 11, 15, Orwell, George 78 17, 18, 36, 40, 41, 57, 58, 60–2, 65, 69, 73, 74–6, 77, 80–1, 87–9, PAIGC (Partido Africano da 90, 107–8, 125–6, 127, 128, 146, Independência da Guiné e Cabo 153, 165, 168, 186, 208, 236 Verde) 169 ‘native question’ 26, 101, 174–5 Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) 13–14, Naudé, Beyers 11, 31, 89, 166–7, 170, 23, 27, 139, 208 171, 173, 174, 176, 187, 193, participative democracy 115, 177 195 n.48, 213, 216, 228 passes 139–40 Naudé, Ilse Hedwig 167 Paton, Alan 101, 103, 174, 216 Ndamse, C.M.C. 82 Pelser, P.C. 126 Ndebele, Njabulo 232 Perquin, Bonaventure 63 Nefolovhodwe, Pandelani 202 Phakathi, Jane 188 Nengwekhulu, Ranwedzi 126, 185 Phillip, Rubin 210 New Farm Settlement Project 119–20 Phoenix Settlement 102 Index 265

Pityana, Barney 7, 14, 32, 33, 34, 40, Rivonia trial (1964) 24, 28 41, 46, 58, 68–9, 77–9, 82, 85, 90, Robertson, Ian 59 105–6, 117, 126, 142–3, 160, 170, Rossouw, John 178 174, 195 n.48, 210, 213, Russell, David 183 219 n.27, 236 pluralism 179–80 Sacks, Peter 108 Polley, Jim 40 Sangotsha, Pumla 159 Poovalingam, Pat 101 Sapire, Hilary 3, 14 Pope, M.W.M. 65 Sartre, Jean-Paul 62, 112, 117, Poqo 32, 209 134 n.83, 224 poverty datum line (PDL) 122, 123, SASO Newsletter 7, 41, 43, 44, 45, 80, 124 82, 85–7, 104, 112, 119, 126, 142, Pretorius, Paul 18, 76, 81, 87, 88, 90, 143, 145, 151, 152, 170–1 127, 210 SASO Nine trial 18–19, 126, 202–3, Pro Veritate 31, 48, 153–4, 167, 170, 204–9, 213, 217, 222 173, 181, 213 Schlemmer, Lawrence 125, 144, 179, Programme to Combat Racism 216 (WCC) 169–71, 213 Sebidi, Lebamang 189 Progressive Federal Party 216 The Secular City (Harvey Cox) 30, 37 Progressive Party 83 Sedibe, Glory 3 Prohibition of Improper Interference Sedibe, Kaborane 202 Act (1968) 59 Selby-Taylor, Robert 35 Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act Senghor, Léopold 6, 105, 151 (1949) 100 Seroke, Joyce 150 Shapiro, Ivor 178 race and racism 4, 8, 111, 113–14, 115, Sharpeville Massacre (1960) 16, 23 116–17, 118, 169, 189, 232, 236 Shepstone, Theophilus 101 Ramgobin, Mewa 102 Shezi, Mthuli ka 184, 211 Ramphele, Mamphela 17, 42, 78, 79, Shutte, Augustine 63, 64 106, 107, 110, 116, 117, 118, 119, Sibisi, Charles 143, 184 120, 138–9, 142, 146–8, 157, 159, Sieberhagen, N. 85 233 Sinclair, Jean 155 Randall, Peter 109, 173–4, 175, 176, Sitas, Ari 225, 230 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 186–7 Sjollema, Baldwin 168–9 Ravan Press 178 Slabbert, Frederik van Zyl 62, 92 n.26 Ray, Gerald 37, 38 Small, Adam 82, 203 Rees, John 187 Smith, M.G. 180 Rhodes University 37, 63, 70, 71 Snyman, J.H. 202 Rick Turner Memorial Lectures Sobukwe, Robert 32, 210, 211 229–30, 232 social movements 2, 13 266 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

Soggot, David 207, 208 St Mary’s Cathedral incident Sono, Themba 61, 83, 87, 105 (Johannesburg, 1972) 86 South African Communist Party St Nicholas’ Priory (Stellenbosch) (SACP) 6, 225, 226–7 63–4 South African Congress of Trade St Peter’s Seminary (Hammanskraal) Unions (SACTU) 225 189 South African Council of Churches Stadler, Alf 179 (SACC) 170, 171, 172, 174, 181, state of emergency (1960) 23 184, 185, 190, 191, 192, 195 n.48, Steve Biko Memorial Lectures 232 228, see also Christian Council of Stubbs, Aelred 12, 34, 159, 183, South Africa 209–12, 217 South African Institute of Race Student Christian Association (SCA) Relations (SAIRR) 3, 60, 89, 168 35, 49 South African Labour Bulletin 125, 224 student protest 58, 65–6, 67–72, 73, South African Students’ Organisation 75, 76, 85–6, 89, 90, 91 n.12 (SASO) 8, 9, 10, 11–12, 14, Student Radical Association (UCT) 29 15–16, 17–18, 25, 34, 37, 40–1, Study Project on Christianity in 42–3, 45, 46, 47, 49, 57, 58, 73, Apartheid Society 1 (SPRO-CAS 74, 75–7, 78, 81–3, 85, 86, 87–8, 1) 8, 109–10, 120, 127, 129, 158, 89, 90, 103, 104–5, 106, 118, 119, 165, 171, 173–81, 192, 236, see 121, 126, 128, 139, 142–3, 145, also Special Project for Christian 147, 148, 149–50, 151, 152, 158, Action in Society 159–60, 166, 172, 182, 184, 185, Suttner, Raymond 139 201, 202, 204, 206, 212, 213, 222, Suzman, Helen 155 236, 237 South West African People’s Tambo, Oliver 32 Organisation (SWAPO) 150 Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Temple, William 30 Conference (SACBC) 36 Tena, M. 72 Soweto Uprising (June 1976) 1, 9, 16, Tip, Karel 122 19, 203, 209, 213, 222, 225 Tiro, Abram Onkgopotse 84–5, 86, space and place (as concepts) 3, 12–13, 97 n.115, 203, 211 17, 100–1, 236 Tlhagale, Buti 189 Special Project for Christian Action Trade Union Advisory and Co- in Society (SPRO-CAS 2) 181–4, ordinating Council (TUACC) 186, 187, 192 224 sport 107 trade unions 1, 3, 115, 116, 122, 125, Springfield College of Education 85 128, 179, 222, 223, 224, 226, 227, St Francis College (Mariannhill) 33 230–1 St George’s Cathedral incident (Cape Transvaal College of Education 85 Town, 1972) 86 Trapido, Stanley 180 Index 267

Tricameral Parliament 223 as University of Natal teacher 107, Trumbull, Howard 103 108–9 Turner, Barbara see Hubbard, Barbara and women 146 Turner, Foszia see Fisher, Foszia and workers 122, 125, 230–1 Turner, Jane 216 see also The Eye of the Needle Turner, Jann 214, 230 Tutu, Desmond 195 n.48, 214, 217, Turner, Richard 228, 231, 232, 233 and alternative society 113, 114–15, Tyacke, Eric 123 116, 121, 203, 215 and armed struggle 216 (MK) 16 atheism 117 United Democratic Front (UDF) banning 127–8, 215, 222 225–6, 227 and Black Consciousness 116, universities 117–18, 119, 215 Afrikaans-medium 60 birth and early years 62 black (bush) 15, 26, 39–41, 58, 64, on capitalism 118 81, 84, 85, 86–7, 89, 90 legacy 216, 222, 224, 226, 228–30, English-medium 60, 64, 69, 71, 231 80–1, 86 and liberation struggle 229 University Christian Movement and Mafeje affair 65 (UCM) 11, 28, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, marriages 62, 110 43, 44, 45–6, 47, 49, 63, 68, 82, murder and memorial service 19, 89, 152, 165, 168, 184–5, 210, 236 214, 215–16, 222 University of Cape Town (UCT) and New Farm Settlement Project 64–6, 69, 70, 73, 86, 90 119–20 University of Durban-Westville and NUSAS 75, 87, 99, 127 (UDW) 15, 85, 86 political networking 109 University of Fort Hare (formerly and political philosophy 62–3, 64 Fort Hare College) 15, 32, 41, on racism 113–14, 115 66–73, 82, 85, 90, 103, 143 relationship with Biko 11, 18, 99, University of Natal 41, 69, 70, 85, 110, 113, 115, 116–17, 120, 129, 108, 143 134 n.83, 209 Medical School 10, 101, 103, 104–5, and SASO 104, 109 129–30 n.3, 145–6 and SASO Nine trial 18–19, 128, University of the North (Turfloop) 203, 204–6, 208–9 10, 15, 40, 61, 71, 83–5, 86, 143, and the Schlebusch Commission 201–2 127 University of the Western Cape and SPRO-CAS 1 109–10, 113, (UWC) 15, 85, 97 n.120, 201 175–8 University of the Witwatersrand 66, as student 62, 203 69, 70, 73, 75, 86 268 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

University of Zululand 15, 85, 143 Wilgespruit Fellowship Centre Urban Training Project (UTP) 122, (Johannesburg) 155–6 123 Williams, Robert C. 121 Usher, Dick 108 Wilson, Francis 29–30, 31 Wilson, Lindy 78, 104, 146, 159 Van Buren, Paul 30 Wilson, Monica 64 Van den Berghe, Pierre 180 Wolpe, Harold 180 Van der Merwe, Phil 70, 71 women Van der Merwe, Stoffel 204, 206, 208 march on the Union Buildings Van Heerden, Auret 223 (Pretoria, 1956) 139–40 Van Wyk, Fred 31 in national liberation movements Venter, P.J. 89 149, 150–2, 154–5, 156 Versfeld, Martin 62, 176, 203, 218 see also Black Conscousness, and n.15 women Verwoerd, Hendrik 24, 59, 77, 166 Wood, Chris 127 Woods, Donald 11, 147, 182, 183, 213 Villa-Vicencio, Charles 40 workerism and populism 226 Von Holdt, Karl 232 World Council of Churches (WCC) Vorster, B.J. 59, 66, 89, 127, 166, 191, 23–4, 168–70, 195 n.48, 235 202 World Student Christian Federation Vorster, Veronica 74 (WSCF) 35, 38 Worrell, Denis 181 Wa Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ 232, 233 Wrankmore, Bernard 168 wages commissions 74, 81, 122, 123–4, 125, 187 Young Christian Workers (YCW) Walker, Cherryl 154 122–3, 190 Webster, Eddie 118, 125, 216, 224, Young Women’s Christian Association 230 (YWCA) 150 Weder, Ilse Hedwig see Naudé, Ilse Hedwig Zanempilo Health Centre 12, 146–7, Welsh, David 29 148, 159, 213 Westcott, Nikki 178 Zulu, Alphaeus 171 White Conscientisation Programme Zuma, Jacob 7, 237 (SPRO-CAS 2) 183–4 Zwelithini, Goodwill 124 white liberals and radicals 8, 10, 11–12, 16, 27–8, 43–4, 60, 74–5, 81, 82, 83, 87, 100, 101, 110–11, 113, 118–19, 129, 155, 165, 176, 192, 230–1, 236–7 Wiehahn, Nicholas 223