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...Black Consciousness movement began in the late 1960s, based on the idea that South African blacks had to break out of the psychological chains created by a racist system before they could win the struggle for full liberation. Biko and other black students at the universities of South Africa argued that until blacks learned attitudes of self-reliance and dignity--attitudes that have been suppressed by centuries of legal white supremacy--they could not win the fight against economic exploitation. It was not enough, they said, to work with liberal white students for majority rule. Black South Africans...

Author: By Gay Seidman, | Title: Biko: A Man for His People | 5/12/1978 | See Source »

...worth quoting at some length Biko's own early coments on the movement, written in the late 1960s...

Author: By Gay Seidman, | Title: Biko: A Man for His People | 5/12/1978 | See Source »

...Biko's ideas may not have been entirely new; the idea that a racist society has psychological as well as sociological effects appears in Frantz Fanon, in West Africa's Negritude movement, and in the Black Power movement of the United States, among other places. But in South Africa--where courageous and outspoken black leaders have been regularly killed and jailed by the white rulers--the Black Consciousness movement meant a great deal. The Black Consciousness movement, as expressed by the all-black South African Students Organization and by the Black People's Convention, meant that South African blacks...

Author: By Gay Seidman, | Title: Biko: A Man for His People | 5/12/1978 | See Source »

Woods does not explain why Bantu Stephen Biko, a medical student who was raised in the Transkei and attended a Catholic secondary school, developed the consciousness he did. We do not learn, for instance, why Biko himself was not bound by the psychological restrictions he described, or, if he was, how he freed himself. Woods may not have known. Although he was acquainted with Biko, and counted Biko one of his most valued friends, Woods does not claim that Biko confided many personal details to the white editor of the East London Daily Dispatch...

Author: By Gay Seidman, | Title: Biko: A Man for His People | 5/12/1978 | See Source »

...Biko explains clearly why Biko's ideas were accepted so easily, and why they became a major element in the recent struggles in South Africa. Long excerpts from Biko's articles and speeches, as well as anecdotes about him, show that he was both articulate and persuasive, easily able to bring his audience to understand his ideas and to sympathize with his goals. At times, Woods seems ready to canonize Biko. Yet one can hardly blame him, for Biko seems to have brought Woods and many other South Africans, both black and white, to a new awareness of the more...

Author: By Gay Seidman, | Title: Biko: A Man for His People | 5/12/1978 | See Source »

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