Black consciousness won’t save us from harming, maiming and killing each other

There is a question that almost always pops up in discussions about the black consciousness movement. Presented in various permutations, it has to do with the almost saintly reverence people hold for Steve Biko – not without good reason – and whether he would (still) be a revered figure were he alive in 2022. Of course, we don’t know. The same may be said about any thinker, great or small, decades or even centuries after their death. I usually present a philosophical and a historical answer, which almost never satisfies true believers. 

The historical response is that whatever Biko said, he did so at least four decades ago. The philosophical answer is that we should leave room for the possibility that were he still alive, he may have changed his mind over 40 years. In other words, Biko is not alive and cannot defend or better explain the positions he held in the 1970s. This is not to say he was not prescient in some respects. The same goes for any great thinker in history; from Frantz Fanon and Thomas Sankara to Karl Marx.  

Actually, Marx’s old buddy Friedrich Engels reminded us (Chapter 11 of Anti-Dühring) just how ridiculous it was “to ascribe any absolute validity to our present views….” The historical fact (Biko or Fanon expressed themselves decades ago), and philosophical contention (that we ought to leave room for the possibility that they may have changed their ideas over time) are usually met with vitriol and that reverence. Let us set that aside. 

The other part of the question I am often asked to “defend” or “explain” has to do with the belief that black consciousness was a unifying force that rendered conflict between black people impossible. For what it’s worth, I spent hours with the late Muntu Myeza – who inducted me into the black consciousness movement – arguing that we were too idealistic and romantic about (us) black people at a time when, in the early 1980s in South Africa, we started killing each other. There was nothing exceptional about us, I told Muntu a year or so before he died in 1990. 

Since then, and since Muntu’s death, we have seen an enormous amount of suffering and misery, warlordism, persecution and at least one case of genocide (in Rwanda) across Africa – among black people. I should add, in haste, that this does not set Africa apart; Europeans, Asians, Latin Americans, and just about every group of people have been at war with “their own” kind across history. Some people will probably get bored by the reference I often make, a statement by the British historian Michael Howard that the history of Europe was shaped on an anvil of war. 

We are human after all