In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

191 Notes introduction: the seventi es 1. “Minutes,” fourth GSC, pt. 3, F753, 21, Karis Gerhart Collection (hereafter cited as KGC). For discussion about this in the trial, see, for example, S. v. Cooper, reel 3, 3476–3534, reel 6, 5661, etc., AD1719, Historical Papers, Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand (hereafter cited as HP); each of the nine defendants was asked to explain the resolution. 2. S. v. Cooper, reel 3, 3534. 3. “Sedibe’s Statement,” S. v. Cooper, reel 10, 1–4, AD1719, HP. 4. It was an ebb, perhaps, but as a recent work has demonstrated, not a full stop. See, for example, Raymond Suttner, The ANC Underground in South Africa ( Johannesburg , South Africa: Jacana Press, 2008), and Julian Brown, “Public Protest and Violence in South Africa, 1948–1976” (PhD diss., Oxford University, 2010). 5. Chronicles of the 1970s include Gail Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Robert Fatton, Black Consciousness in South Africa: The Dialectics of Ideological Resistance to White Supremacy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986); C. R. D. Halisi, Black Political Thought in the Making of South African Democracy (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1999); and Craig Charney, “Civil Society vs. the State: Identity, Institutions, and the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2000). These works share a common teleological bent, which fits Black Consciousness into debates on the theory and practice of resistance to apartheid and on multiracial democracy. The Black Consciousness Movement has also played a prominent role in two sweeping, multivolume collections, each with a revealing title: South African Democracy Educational Trust, The Road to Democracy in South Africa (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2007), and Gail Gerhart and Thomas Karis, From Protest to Challenge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). Two recent publications marked the thirtieth anniversary of Biko’s death: Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander, and Nigel Gibson, eds., Biko Lives! (New York: Palgrave Macmillan , 2008), and Chris Van Wyk, Celebrating Steve Biko: We Write What We Like (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). For a more sustained critique of the literature on Black Consciousness, see Daniel Magaziner, “‘Black Man, You Are on Your Own!’: Making Race Consciousness in South African Thought, 1968–1972,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 42, no. 2 (2009): 221–41. 6. Malusi Mpumlwana, interview by the author, 9 March 2006, Pretoria. 7. Bongi Mkhabela, interview by the author, 18 April 2006, Johannesburg, South Africa. 192 w฀ Notes to Pages 4– 6 8. The past, Paul Cohen has reminded us, is remembered in multiple ways, and the interplay between historical knowledge, experience, and myth exposes the problems of teleology. As he notes, “the degree to which the meaning of the past is hostage to [its] as yet undefined future would appear to belie the common view among historians that, as one of us has enunciated it, ‘what comes after cannot influence what came before.’” See Cohen, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience and Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 62. 9. Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 4. Many thanks to Anatoly Pinsky for suggesting the reference and to Guy Ortolano for steering me toward the French Revolution historiography in the first place. Fred Cooper has recently made a similar argument for colonial and postcolonial studies; see his Colonialism in Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 18–19. 10. Consider, for example, the differences between Robert Self ’s American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), and Peniel Joseph’s Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006). Self did not share Joseph’s aspirations to craft a “grand narrative”; instead, he located his study thoroughly in its time and place—postwar Oakland, California—and sought the roots of Oakland’s famed Black Power politics in the particular dynamics of urban transformation there. The result is an altogether more satisfying history that takes what became Oakland-inflected Black Power on its own terms, within its own context. Joseph’s study is magisterial and exhaustive, but in the end, its does not entirely come together—perhaps because the idea of a unitary Black Power movement owes more to retrospective ideology than to history. See Thomas Sugrue ’s Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York...

Share