love, divinity, beauty, and salvific plan while challenging systemic social structures that oppress, subjugate, and exploit people of color.
Biko (1978) describes black consciousness thus:
An attitude of mind and a way of life, the most positive call to emanate from the black world for a long time. Its essence is the realization by the black man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the cause of their oppression—the blackness of their skin—and to operate as a group to rid themselves of the shackles that bind them to perpetual servitude. It is based on a self-examination, which has ultimately led them to believe that by seeking to run away from themselves and emulate the white man, they are insulting the intelligence of whoever created them black. The philosophy of Black Consciousness therefore expresses group pride and the determination of the black to rise and attain the envisaged self. (pp. 91–92)
It is a holistic message to challenge the thinking of blacks to see themselves in the humanity and beauty of their blackness as created by God and not in a spiritual and social Eurocentric inferiority context. So black consciousness is a way of living and thinking that elevates oppressed blacks beyond fear to a liberated way of life where they are able to walk in their true humanity.
White Christianity for Biko is Christianity practiced and preached by some Europeans in South Africa who interpreted, imposed, and lived out the scripture from racially skewed lens, viewing themselves as superior and blacks as inferior. Basically, even for the best-intentioned white Christian, white Christianity’s relationship to blacks was still compromised because of the systemic superior-inferior complex inherent in society through colonialism and apartheid. Whether the white Christian was liberal or racist, he or she was still part of the oppressor’s regime.
Statement of the Problem
In South Africa, during the late 1960s and 1970s, blacks were oppressed by white governmental institutions that were built upon a white supremacist interpretation of Christianity that needed to be liberated by a message that would empower and connect blacks back to God. In an effort to liberate blacks from white oppression, many black church leaders came to know and understand that theology could no longer be from a white Christian perspective but had to be born out of the black experience. It had to be relevant and liberating to the people to whom it was being preached in both South Africa and the United States. Black theology was born out of the struggle against racial injustice and an oppressive situation. Therefore, it is considered to be a “situational theology” (Moore 1973, p. 5). For blacks in America, the situation was the Civil Rights era of the 1950s–1970s (Hopkins 1989), and for blacks in South Africa, it was during the Black Consciousness Movement of the 1960s–1980s (Hopkins 1989). These two time periods are mentioned because black theology, though not new in practice, was new in academic thought and labeled in the early 1960s.
Black theology was coined in the United States by a black theologian named James Cone, who would later be known as the father of black theology. He argued that Jesus was compassionate to and on the side of oppressed blacks because he (Jesus) underwent the same oppressive situation as a Jew under the Roman regime. Cone (1997) compared the experiences of Jesus with those of blacks, pointing out striking parallels in their lives and sufferings. He argued for the blackness of Jesus based upon and identified by his struggle, which showed Jesus’s solidarity with black people against white oppression. Jesus was seen as a strong liberator of the oppressed, fighting against the injustices of his time to free his marginalized people.
On the other hand, Biko was the father of the Black Consciousness Movement, which emerged out of a Christian student organization. Biko was not a preacher necessarily, but he was one who believed that faith was the undergirding strength of a message of liberation for the black people in South Africa. Biko espoused that although it was understood that white people were not superior, black people needed to unite and change the way they thought about themselves and the God they served. Black theology was a way of uniting the black man with his God, overcoming the confusion brought about by the white missionaries’ version of Christianity (Moore 1973, p. 43). There were two faces to Christianity in South Africa for Biko—the old white missionary version that was born out of colonialism and used to subjugate and oppress people of color, and a new emerging Christianity known as black theology that emerged from the struggle of blacks against white oppression.
Black theology would shift the lens of blacks in South Africa from inward moral convictions to outward commitment against major social sinfulness that caused childhood deaths due to starvation, diseases, thuggery, poverty, and other types of socioeconomic struggles that plagued South Africa (Biko 1978). Simply stated, black theology was liberating because it met blacks where they were in their situation, giving hope, identity, solidarity, and reconnection to a God that would fight for and be compassionate toward their sufferings. Black theology is critical in helping blacks create their own worldview, one that captured the spirit, heart, struggle, and history of their people. It is this view that would bring about a new Christian social ethics that blacks could use to support and be the cornerstone of their efforts toward liberation.
Biko had witnessed and studied enough to know that Eurocentric Christianity was a founding part of the colonial system and its institutions (Biko 1978). Justification of this European brand of Christianity was forcefully imposed based upon the faulty misnomer that black South Africans were evil, savage, barbaric, and uncivilized. To Biko, the liberal white Christians showed more witchery than nonliberal white Christians in that they befriended some of the black intelligentsia and accepted them in their elite circles to show a Christian “love of inclusion” while at the same time silencing them by using platforms of multiracialism and nonracial ideology to keep them in their organizations where whites had control and were the dominant voice.
This was a problem since Biko was convinced that too many blacks did not understand that whites looked upon their situation with sympathy and therefore could never truly relate to the black situation without having experienced the black man’s burden. Whites did not comprehend the urgency of black voices and reactions to racial oppression because they were accustomed to experiencing societal privilege and unknowingly carrying out the message of the oppressor. Therefore, the black students needed their own platform utilizing their own voices to fight racial injustices, not a white Christian sponsor and mouthpiece. Biko became that black voice, along with other blacks, to fight against the racial oppression imposed by the apartheid regime. Of course, his activism, mobilizing of black people, and speaking truth to power made him an enemy of the state, which eventually led to his illegal execution while in police custody.
Aims and Objectives
This research aims to highlight, describe, and analyze Biko’s gospel message of black consciousness and its radical approach to liberating black people through a spiritual and mental awakening of black identity. The goal is to examine the most essential elements of his overall message in a quest toward humanizing blackness as well as analyzing how he targeted different audiences in his message to elevate their consciousness toward envisioning true humanity. The research also shows how critical religion, specifically black theology and white Christianity, was in formulating social ethics and informing politics during apartheid and the development of black consciousness.
Additionally, this study highlights Biko’s contributions to black theological liberation among South Africans and the relevance and staying power of his message today in the context of continued struggles by black people in Africa, America, and around the globe against racial injustice, poverty, police brutality, educational inequality, health disparities, lack of housing, and unemployment, not unlike those of the period of apartheid in South Africa.
Research Questions
This study is guided by the following question: in what ways did Biko’s life, while proclaiming black consciousness as a means to conscientize blacks toward their own liberation, resemble Jesus Christ in life, deeds, words, suffering, and death?
In answering this overarching question,
