the core of who Biko was, his message of black consciousness, the events that led to his death, his understanding of Christianity, and its use within the Black Consciousness Movement.
Who is Steve Biko? What is his Christian background (i.e., upbringing, spiritual experiences, church affiliation, education)? What was Biko’s Christian message, and how did he demonstrate or embody it? What was his message to the white Christian liberal? What events led Biko to believe that Christianity in South Africa, especially among students, needed to be reconceptualized? How did those who believed in a multiracial and nonracial utopia respond to his message? What was his message to black intelligentsia who bought into the liberal message of inclusivity and multiracialism? What was his Christian message of black empowerment to awaken black consciousness and breathe life into the souls of colonized and oppressed blacks? How did he challenge and speak truth to white supremacist power in the apartheid government with black consciousness? In what ways does his message speak to the black situation today in South Africa?
Theoretical Framework
The theoretical frameworks of this dissertation draws on the work of a number of scholars, such as James Cone (1969, 1970, 1997, 2011), Paulo Freire (2000), Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1986), Frantz Fanon (2004), and others who have developed concepts and theories on the relationship between religion and society with a particular focus on race, oppression, struggle, liberation, and social justice. Specifically, Cone’s theory of black theology, as well as similar articulations, such as liberation theology from Latin America, are employed to ground descriptions and an analysis of Biko’s thought and practice of struggle and liberation in South Africa.
James Cone’s concept of black theology is pivotal in helping to understand and analyze Biko’s two views of Christianity: one black and one white. Cone has several books on this topic: The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2011), God of the Oppressed (1997), A Black Theology of Liberation (1970), and Black Theology and Black Power (1969), to name a few. Under an oppressive apartheid government, Biko realized there were two types of Christianity that developed during this segregated era—that of the oppressed and oppressor. Black theology, which became an integral part of Biko’s black consciousness ideology, had picked up momentum in South Africa among young blacks in their resistance movements.
In considering theoretical frameworks, James Cone’s concept of black theology is useful for explaining how blacks and whites interpreted the scriptures differently, which produced different social beliefs, responses, and actions. Black theology creates a platform that reconnects God to black people and their collective experiences. Jesus experienced oppression, pain, suffering, and even death but found victory beyond the cross as a resurrected King and Savior, which is relatable to the black experience of slavery, torture, lynching, and execution at the hands of whites in the Americas and Africa.
Cone (2011) juxtaposes lynching with crucifixion upon a cross: “Both the cross and the lynching tree represented the worst in human beings and at the same time ‘an unquenchable ontological thirst’ for life that refuses to let the worst determine our final meaning” (p. 3). Cone states that experiences of blacks as a people in history and culture caused us to approach, analyze, and interpret the scriptures out of our collective experiences. So with blacks being an oppressed, abused, and exploited people, black theology would differ from the theology of white Christians, who were privileged, superior, and of the oppressive regime in society.
Cone (1997) further asks:
What is the connection between life and theology? The answer cannot be the same for blacks and whites, because blacks and whites do not share the same life. The lives of a black slave and white slaveholder were radically different. It follows that their thoughts about things divine would also be different, even though they might sometimes use the same words about God. The life of the slaveholder and others of that culture was that of extending white inhumanity to excruciating limits, involving the enslavement of Africans and the annihilation of Indians. The life of the slave was the slave ship, the auction block, and the plantation regime. It involved the attempt to define oneself without the ordinary historical possibilities of self-affirmation. Therefore, when the master and slave spoke of God, they could not possibly be referring to the same reality. (p. 9)
During the apartheid era, the experience of blacks was extremely different from that of whites in society; black experience was focused on fighting for liberation within a white racist society. It is not surprising that Biko would see the need for the development of a Christian experience that was not forced upon them by European Christian belief systems or taught and interpreted by whites, but a black theology born out of the black South African experience that spoke of freedom in the here and now. The “truth,” as espoused in the gospels, had to speak to their situation, history, and culture.
Cone (1997) states:
There is no truth for and about black people that does not emerge out of the context of their experience. Truth in this sense is black truth, a truth disclosed in the history and culture of black people. This means that there can be no black theology which does not take the black experience as a source for its starting point. Black theology is a theology of and for black people, an examination of their stories, tales, and sayings. It is an investigation of the mind into the raw materials of our pilgrimage, telling the story of ‘how we got over.’ For theology to be black, it must reflect upon what it means to be black. Black theology must uncover the structures and forms of the black experience, because the categories of interpretation must arise out of the thought forms of the black experience itself. (pp. 15–16)
Thus, America’s Black Power Movement involved redefining black identity in a white world and fighting against systemic oppression socially, economically and politically. Comparatively, black theology introduced God into the mix from a black perspective, bringing his liberating power into the equation void of a European context. As Cone explains, “Black theology puts black identity in a theological context, showing that black power is not only consistent with the gospel of Jesus Christ, but that it is the gospel of Jesus Christ” (as cited in Moore 1973, p. 48).
James Cone’s theory helps explain Biko’s desire to focus on black theology, which uplifts the black populace, as opposed to an oppressive view of Christianity from the perspective of white individuals with good intentions. Whites and blacks were born into and nurtured by two different experiences; therefore, black people needed to have a view of Christianity that provided a truth that would nurture and promulgate their freedom.
Additionally, answers to the following questions help clarify this theoretical notion: Was Biko correct in seeing and drawing a distinction between a white and black Christian experience? How and why did Jesus and his experiences relate to the black experience? Did blacks and whites of that time period and even in today’s society see God and interpret the scriptures differently?
While Cone showed how blacks related to Jesus through shared experiences of oppression and suffering, Obery Hendricks (2006), in his book The Politics of Jesus, portrays Jesus as a revolutionary, a radical fighting God, one who was on the side of the oppressed and spoke truth to power, disrupting systemic oppressive institutions of his time. Indeed, Hendricks explains that Jesus fought from the temple to the imperial courts. His message was economic, social, and political just as much as it was spiritual. Hendricks’s perspective helps lay the foundation for understanding spiritual power emanating and empowering a social, economic, and political movement for blacks in South Africa. Invoking the scriptures (Luke 4:18–19), Hendricks argues:
Jesus announces that the reason for his anointing by God and the purpose of his mission in the world are one and the same—to proclaim radical economic, social, and political change. (loc. 179)
Biko used black theology and liberation theology as a strategy to aid in changing the European paradigms that existed among blacks. He wanted to sharpen their consciousness by presenting Christianity in a way that combated the white paradigms inherent in their interpretation of Christianity.
