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140 8 w฀฀The Age of Politics Confronting the State the black Consciousness Movement did not assume the mantle of 1970s opposition to apartheid unopposed. The poet cited in the last chapter pledged to struggle against “white racism”—this was obvious. The challenge of “Bantustanism ” was less clear, as was the memory and current role of previous liberation movements. Over the course of the early 1970s, Black Consciousness activists considered the legacy of the PAC and ANC and debated among themselves the correct course of action regarding the ostensibly independent black “republics” that the government championed. In these discussions, activists manufactured Black Consciousness the Movement, not the epistemology or philosophy, culminating in 1972 with the establishment of the Black People’s Convention, the first expressly political black organization since 1960. SASO had previously eschewed direct political confrontation, but as it morphed into the Black Consciousness Movement, both internal and external conflict ensued. In this regard, I agree with James Brennan’s recent reflections on German political theorist Carl Schmitt in light of African political history. “The process of defining enemies and constructing purge categories constituted a politics of enmity,” Brennan wrote, “or what Carl Schmitt holds to be the fundamental feature of the political, the distinction between friend and enemy.”1 This held for Tanganyika in the 1950s, and in the 1970s, South African activists began to “sort the non-whites from the blacks,” with blacks defined as the conscientized few who embraced their blackness in the way the Movement deemed appropriate.2 As the philosophy turned Movement began to name its friends and call out its enemies, the state took an increasing interest in its activities, which helped to drive events along, even as some activists worried that their organizations were moving too quickly past “stage one.” The Age of Politics: Confronting the State w 141 Soon, events spun out of Black Consciousness’s control. Conversations that started on isolated college campuses moved into cities, protest rallies, courts, and ultimately township streets following 16 June 1976. Black Consciousness ways of thinking changed in the course of things, and it was this contingent process of ideological maturation and confrontation that eventually saw the Movement ascend the 1970s. blacks and “nonwhi tes ” At the outset, 1970s activists demonstrated little interest in supplanting previous liberation movements. “We already had political parties and that was not the point,” Mplumlwana told me.3 Indeed, SASO had prided itself on counting both ANC and PAC members in its ranks.4 For his part, Barney Pityana saw no conflict in remaining an ANC supporter even while founding SASO. “We needed to be a new movement that acknowledge[d] the ANC and other organizations,” he remembered, but also brought “a new cadre of young people into a consciousness of themselves that [was] not defined by where they had been or whatever loyalties they had.” Thus, in SASO, people such as Biko—whom Pityana and others described as PAC—could share space with ANC loyalists.5 In fact, although SASO was skeptical of nationalist movements and what they could and could not achieve, during its first few years it never claimed to have taken over from previous organizations. In 1971, for example, when the SASO Newsletter covered Malawian president Hastings Banda’s visit to South Africa, it excoriated him for not meeting black South Africa’s “true leaders”—not SASO but those “who are either in Robben Island, in exile or in banishment.”6 Even after forming BPC, prominent leaders such as Mandela and Sobukwe remained highly regarded, even if Black Consciousness activists claimed that, in Mandela’s case, they respected him in spite of his organization.7 Black Consciousness activists often described themselves as placeholders for the more established organizations: activists celebrated “the history and achievement of the black movements” that preceded SASO and suggested that they were merely trying prepare “the mind of the people” for the struggle that the ANC and PAC would rightfully bring. The latter organizations’ had a “practical” project , activists suggested, whereas SASO’s was a “philosophical one.”8 Questions of placeholding and intent sometimes undermined Black Consciousness ’s legitimacy, especially within exile circles. As activists left the country for a variety of reasons during the 1970s, they encountered ANC members who dismissed SASO and its philosophical project as a “baby organization of confused people.”9 Indeed, despite SASO’s efforts to valorize student politics as an arena of struggle, others rejected its emphasis on philosophy as the immature or underdeveloped product...

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