and contributes to it significantly with a specific focus on the Christian message inherent in Biko’s thinking on and practice of black consciousness—a black gospel for a black people. This study is equally important because it points to the necessity and effectiveness of religion in society and how it influences the political and social arena. Lastly, the study is important because it produces a good understanding and appreciation of commonalities and parallels within South Africa and the global African diaspora over broad time spans in matters of race relations and struggles against political, religious, social, and economic injustice to attain liberation from an oppressive rule.
Literature Review
The goal of this study is to analyze Biko’s personification and proclamation of a radical gospel message as put forth in the Black Consciousness Movement. For him, these two groups—black Christians and white Christians—showed an evolution of behaviors based upon their interpretation of Christianity, specifically Christian social ethics. During the early 1960s–1970s, Biko’s writings show how both groups responded to the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) and BCM’s interpretation of black theology (BT). Beyond his book I Write What I Like and Basil Moore’s The South African Voice, the review examines works and scholars that shed light on Biko’s Christian tenets professed and demonstrated in the Black Consciousness Movement. Biko’s books and the writings of other scholars highlighted in the literature review give insight into his life and the Black Consciousness Movement; however, none of them fully deal with Biko’s Christian tenets manifested and proclaimed in his message. The one book that speaks most directly to the Christian component within black consciousness, The Law and the Prophets by Daniel R. Magaziner (2010), mainly focuses upon the intellectual history of participants in the South African Students’ Organization yet falls short of fully focusing primarily on the Christian message developed, spoken, and demonstrated by Biko within the Black Consciousness Movement from 1968 to 1977. This research seeks to close this gap in the literature.
Black consciousness has long been thought of as a gospel for black South Africans. Biko and others who sought to focus on this aspect of the movement had to determine how to refocus Christianity without changing the heart of the Christian message, which was to show God’s love and validation of blacks. Black consciousness called South Africans to have faith in themselves and in the promise, ultimately, of a future that encouraged redress of the injustice perpetuated against them. Its adherents compared it to a religion and called it the “gospel” (Magaziner 2010, p. 57).
In an apartheid South Africa, C. R. D. Halisi, in his essay “Biko and Black Consciousness Philosophy: An Interpretation,” stated, “Steve Biko believed that black consciousness philosophy, by providing an alternative to psychological complicity with racial oppression, could expedite the subjective prerequisites needed for black liberation” (as cited in Hook 2014, p. 164). It was this very thinking among Biko and his peers that led to the development of the South African Students’ Organization.
The group was formed when Biko and the black students realized that “as long as the white liberals are our spokespersons, there will be no black spokesmen” (Woods 1978, p. 96). Black students “began to realize that blacks themselves had to speak out about the black predicament” (Woods 1978, p. 96). This caused a lot of tension, especially among white liberals found in two groups, one in which Biko was a member before breaking away and forming SASO. These groups were the National Union of South African Students’ (NUSAS) and the University Christian Movement (UCM) led by Basil Moore.
Xolela Mangcu (2012), in Biko: A Biography, shares that the black members of UCM began seeking ways to address the broader political challenges of the day rather than be part of the NUSAS goal of defining their theological identities. In fact, states Mangcu, Biko and his colleagues began to search for a theological framework that spoke to the practical needs of black people (p. 173). Many in NUSAS began to disagree with Biko’s ideology, like “liberal whites who felt that black consciousness was racist and anti-white. These liberals believed that the only way in which apartheid could be opposed was through integration between black and whites” (Price 1992, p. 17).
Biko was clear that there was a need to empower and liberate black people and this goal could not be accomplished by whites alone. Many of the leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) had been imprisoned and others executed while in police custody. Subsequently, the black social justice front experienced a sustained silence until the Black Consciousness Movement arrived on the scene. In her book Steve Biko: They Fought For Freedom, Linda Price states that the “Black Consciousness Movement was bridging the political vacuum that had existed in South Africa since the government tried to suppress all opposition to apartheid in the 1960s” (Price 1992, p. 14). Additionally, Halisi, in his essay “Biko and Black Consciousness Philosophy: An Interpretation,” similarly stated, “Black Consciousness philosophy openly confronted the pathology of racism in South African society and its impact on both black and white South Africans” (as cited in Hook 2014, p. 167).
Bishop Tutu took a spiritual view, explaining that blacks see themselves through a European lens. He stated:
Black Consciousness was meant to exorcise this demon, to make us realize, as he [Biko] said, we were human and not inferior, just as the white person was human and not superior. I internalized what others had decided was to be my identity, not my God-given utterly precious and unique me. (As cited in Steve Biko Foundation 2009, p. 96).
These views lead to a pivotal component of black theology (BT), which was that neither blacks nor whites are superior or inferior to each other.
Biko “called into question whether the so-called black churches were really black” (du Toit and Maluleke 2008, p. 62). Du Toit and Maluleke (2008), in an essay in The Legacy of Stephen Bantu Biko: Theological Challenges, stated, “Biko was unflinching in his conviction that as long as black people looked for and accepted white leadership in all spheres, including religion, they were not yet ready to take their future in their own hands” (p. 62). Dwight Hopkins sheds further light on Biko’s stance, in stating that “black Christians [according to Biko] could not wholeheartedly fight against the sins of the white church because they, in fact, had accepted and internalized white dogma” (as cited in Pityana 1991, p. 195). This was experienced and evidenced in the monopoly of white leadership in black churches excluding the Dutch Reformed churches. Biko (1978) asserted, “Blacks comprised 70–90 percent of lay persons, while at the same time 70–90 percent of the leadership of these very same churches was white” (p. 195).
Biko, in an interview noted in Donald Woods’s (1978) book, addresses this issue: “Although the social hierarchy within the church was a white/black hierarchy, the sharing of responsibility for church affairs was exclusively white” (p. 96). These problems within the black churches during this time caused young blacks to question the status quo and begin to look for a Christ that had a voice and theology that would lead to liberation for black people. There was a need for a God who could understand, relate to, and fight for the oppressed blacks in South Africa—a God who was in essence “black,” not just in the sense of ethnicity, but could relate to the sociopolitical and socioeconomic situations of those who were oppressed under the white man’s rule.
Shannen Hill (2015), in her book Biko’s Ghost: The Iconography of Black Consciousness, states, “Black theology has been called ‘an important aspect of black consciousness,’ and indeed it is, be it equally so is BC vital to black theology” (p. 42). Hill states that in 1971, Biko argued that it was ‘the duty…of all black priests and ministers of religion to save Christianity’ and Christians from the gross misrepresentation of Africa and Africans in the hands of colonial clergy” (p. 42). Hill further states that Biko, in an interview, made a profound statement “that we as blacks cannot forget the fact that Christianity in Africa is tied up with the entire colonial process. This meant that Christians came here with a form of culture which they called Christian but which in effect was Western, and which expressed itself as an imperial culture as far as Africa was concerned” (p. 96).
Furthermore,
