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 Periodical article |
 Leiden University catalogue |
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| Title: | 'Black man, you are on your own!': making race consciousness in South African thought, 1968-1972 |
| Author: | Magaziner, Daniel |
| Year: | 2009 |
| Periodical: | International Journal of African Historical Studies |
| Volume: | 42 |
| Issue: | 2 |
| Pages: | 221-240 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | South Africa |
| Subjects: | black consciousness ideologies students political history apartheid 1960-1969 1970-1979 |
| External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/40282386 |
| Abstract: | The assertion of Barney Pityana, Steve Biko's successor as the president of the South African Students Organization (SASO): 'Black man, you are on your own', has often been interpreted to reflect black university students' decision, in 1968, to withdraw from the multiracial Union of South African Students (NUSAS). Yet, the present author argues that the ideas contained within Pityana's phrase more appropriately belonged not only to the conflict with white liberals and against the white State of South Africa, but to a conversation that activists were determined to first have among blacks: the phrase might also be read as a philosophical statement about identity and responsibility. Between 1968 and 1972, future Black Consciousness leaders were engaged in thinking, exploring, critiquing and developing their own perspective on the issues that mattered to them. It was then that they wrote about race, about adulthood and identity; it was then that they developed the ideas that constituted Black Consciousness and which they carried into the struggle against apartheid after 1972. The author examines these themes, using writings published in SASO Newsletter from this period and, amongst others, by Steve Biko, to illustrate his argument. Notes, ref. [ASC Leiden abstract] |
