Share

Book review: The Black Consciousness Reader

accreditation

The Black Consciousness Reader by Baldwin Ndaba, Therese Owen, Masego Panyane, Rabbie Serumula, Janet Smith and Paballo Thekiso

Jacana Media

354 pages

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

R209 at takealot.com

. ..--

When our popular history of black consciousness (BC), much as with our broader history of struggle, is so often written flatly around the life of a singular great man, how might we remember its story differently?

This is the impossible question the writers of the Black Consciousness Reader seem to ask of themselves and its abiding reader.

Memory and resistance

In the course of its seven chapters and digital multimedia, the reader takes us through a more expansive history of the philosophy, the movement and its aesthetics than we’ve become used to in our collective remembering of BC.

I use remembering here to denote more than just the faculty by which we reposit and recall our memory of a person, moment or event in the linear passage of time.

I mean it to say our thoughtful consideration of memory as a complex, living, motive force of our collective making through which we interpret ourselves today.

This treatment of memory is important for how one navigates the book, I think, because of how (in principle) it is less interested in who was there in the makings of the BC movement we know today, and more so in where and through whom else we might see it to be present and alive.

Each chapter is a mixed bag of vignettes of the motions and moments of BC as told in the voice and through the memorialisation of much more than the usual suspects.

In some of the new interviews, such as with Professor Ranwedzi Harry Nengwekhulu, a fellow founder member of the SA Students’ Organisation, with which BC is so closely identified, and Sibongile Mkhabela, who leads the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, we are given some texture to the kinds of conditions that gave rise to this radical political consciousness, the kinds of people it sought to model in the world, and the rapid expansion of its practice and activist proponents through student, church and community organising.

Restoring the women

The Conscious Women, a chapter I looked forward to for daring to imagine a women’s history of BC, is a necessary and inexhaustible exercise in saying the names of some of the women whose exalted place in anti-settler-colonial resistance has been underplayed and forgotten through both omission and erasure.

We are reminded that our centuries-long history of colonial conquest and exploitation did not go by uninterrupted by women such as Nzinga of the Ndongo and Matamba, and Manthatisi oa Batlokwa, who, though dislocated by 300 years, shared a singularity of purpose in asserting the sovereignty of their people (alongside the continuity of their rule).

BC must have come from somewhere.

There are also the familiar histories of Fatima Meer and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, which are interwoven between the less-developed though equally remarkable stories of Nikiwe Matshoba and rain-bringer Winnie Motlalepula Kgware.

The latter would be called to lead us in the collective imagining and making of a decidedly antiracist, anticapitalist and (I read into this) antisexist world upon being elected the first president of the Black People’s Convention.

Even when so little is written and remembered about her in our collective memory, her name is still held up as one of the earliest to establish our modern tradition of treating the university as a crucial site for practising and fine-tuning rigour in revolutionary thought, and translating it into praxis.

But even as these women are written back into the history of BC, they don’t quite inhabit it. Their significance in this tradition is still in service to the movement – as its mothers and martyrs – and less so for themselves and as the authors of its philosophy, its practice and its aesthetics.

Even so, this is perhaps precisely what the chapter is demanding we do.

Women’s popular histories and traditions of resistance being so few, flat and narrow, the reader with an abiding sense of history, is impelled to imagine, remember and write more expansive women’s histories of BC – women’s histories that are not told through the great men they nurtured, stood by or slept with.

What about the land?

Disappointingly, The Black Consciousness Reader’s shortest and weakest chapter concerns what it tells us is BC’s continuing struggle – land.

Conceding to the correct view that the land’s unconditional return is of singular symbolic importance in the restoration of the dignity of the black dispossessed, it does little to explore the mechanisms by which this might be brought about in our lifetimes, or how we might do the business of land justice differently on the day following that revolution.

Perhaps not being allowed a position but that of listener in this conversation, its author dared not look beyond the staggering consequence of our alienation to home to her advantage – who knows?

But here, among us, surely BC calls on us to do more than just relish in the rhetoric of the (forcible) transfer of land for ourselves to have and to hoard it?

Surely BC demands of us to be constantly imagining, from a position of consciousness, new formulations for the just and equitable distribution of the land’s plenty among and for the prosperity of all who should call it home, it now being all our bread and dignity?

I wonder what kinds of conversations we might be able to have about the contours of land justice in our present day if we actually tested the convenient rumour with which our votes and our retweets are won: that the construction of the land clause in the Constitution makes it impossible for us to take and transform it.

One might be forgiven for thinking that careful thought had not been applied to this question had not former Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke in 2014 counselled us of our ill-informed and clumsy assault of our Constitution in this regard.

As he reflects on transition and transformation under our constitutional democracy, he makes quick work of dispelling our favoured myth that section 25 predicates the correction of our own 1913 naqba through expropriation on the willingness of its seller and for a market-related amount.

Even as he candidly concedes the limitations that the traditions of our received legal system place on our ability to establish our rightful claim, he advances a sobering BC illumination of the land clause: that even as it protects all property owners from arbitrary deprivation of property (the very basis and desired effect of the Native Land Act), expropriation of land is not only permitted for, but readily invited by the Constitution, which provides that such expropriation must be propelled by a public purpose or be done in the public interest.

Thought and praxis

This is at the core of the limitations of a reader like this. While it stores history, it doesn’t fully develop our thinking around it for the present.

The Black Consciousness Reader is a product entirely of its time, these 40 years since Biko’s murder when we remember his life and his legacy.

It goes to great lengths to collect as diverse and little-remembered histories in the development of black conscious thought and praxis that they might continue to live together, for us, in one place.

The chapters are dense with so much of what we must remember, yet remain vague on the salience of this memory for us today.

We live in a world where facts and fiction get blurred
Who we choose to trust can have a profound impact on our lives. Join thousands of devoted South Africans who look to News24 to bring them news they can trust every day. As we celebrate 25 years, become a News24 subscriber as we strive to keep you informed, inspired and empowered.
Join News24 today
heading
description
username
Show Comments ()
Voting Booth
Do you believe that the various planned marches against load shedding will prompt government to bring solutions and resolve the power crisis?
Please select an option Oops! Something went wrong, please try again later.
Results
Yes
21% - 103 votes
No
79% - 394 votes
Vote