The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968–1977 (review)

Time flies. With the 1994 end of apartheid quickly approaching its twentieth anniversary, outside observers may be forgiven for thinking that – despite significant challenges like poverty and HIV/AIDS – South Africa continues its upward trend toward political prosperity and stature in the global community. This sanguine view unfortunately bears little resemblance to many political sentiments found on the ground. While the strident form of state-sanctioned racial oppression promulgated after 1948 is indeed over, it has been replaced by growing class conflict accompanied by fear that the ruling African National Congress (ANC) has entrenched itself such that South Africa is a de facto one-party state, despite democratic claims to the contrary. Needless to say, the emergence of this situation has presented new challenges for writing political history in the South African context. The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968–1977 by Daniel Magaziner presents one way out of this dilemma.

The Black Consciousness Movement marked a fundamental shift in anti-apartheid politics by reviving protest after the setbacks of the Sharpeville Massacre (1960) and the Rivonia Trial (1963–64), both of which resulted in the exile and imprisonment of a number of activists, most notably Nelson Mandela. It consequently signaled a generational shift as well. Magaziner addresses this transition in the three chapters that comprise Part one Making Black Consciousness, noting in particular the ways in which university student politics provided a crucible for the rise of this new cohort of activists. Among them was Steve Biko, who founded the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) in 1969 as an alternative to the multiracial, but white-led, National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). This break reflected organizational dissatisfaction, but, as argued by Magaziner, it also represented a vital intellectual turn influenced by decolonization on the African continent as well as the culture and politics of the Black Atlantic. Chapter three offers vivid detail as to how Kenneth Kaunda, Léopold Senghor, Frantz Fanon, James Brown, and Stokely Carmichael, among others, inspired new notions of manhood, adulthood, and peoplehood against a system that sought to deny black South Africans these basic human attributes.

Though Part one covers familiar ground, it serves as preparation for the three chapters in Part two Emergent Gospel that forms the crux of Magaziner’s book. Indeed, Magaziner’s original contribution to understanding Black Consciousness is to place it within a context of revolutionary Christian thought to argue that the movement embraced a form of Black Theology that not merely espoused a sense of positive self-worth, but also a broader vision of political deliverance and societal redemption. In short, pre-existing understandings of Black Consciousness that have typically placed it in the secular intellectual company of Frantz Fanon and Black Power in the United States must be expanded to include this religious dimension. By detailing how Black Consciousness sprang from South Africa’s University Christian Movement and trends in global political theology during the late 1960s, Magaziner consequently offers a different perspective for reconsidering Black Consciousness as well as the diverse intellectual origins and strategic platforms for mobilizing South African activism. Part three The Movement ventures into this complex terrain of praxis and street politics during the 1970s by addressing the spread of ideas through “conscientization,” the 1972 founding of the Black People’s Convention, and, perhaps above all, the Soweto Uprising of 1976, which, as Magaziner notes, caught leaders like Biko by surprise despite being informed by their ideas. His treatment of Biko’s death at the hands of police in 1977 captures best the sense of martyrdom that many activists confronted, and ultimately met, in order to achieve the larger theological, philosophical, and political purpose of the “new humanity” to which they aspired.

In sum, the accomplishment of this book is not only its addition of theological underpinnings to Black Consciousness that have thus far been underplayed, but also the paradigm for political history that...