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159 9 w฀ Keeping Faith with the Black Messiah Suffering, Hope, and the Cost of the Future the agony in Sam Nzima’s photograph is timeless.1 Hector Pietersen is prone, expressionless, dead. Mbuyisa Makhubo is carrying him, determined, but with eyes betraying a hint of fear. Hector’s sister, Antoinette, is dressed in a schoolgirl’s uniform, arms raised, wailing. The image continues to strike, like other iconic images of suffering: a naked girl runs from a wall of napalm, vacant eyes stare back from behind barbed fences at any number of times and places. Yet the suffering depicted in these images is not timeless. Rather, it belongs to particular moments and thoroughly historicized emotional experiences . South Africa’s 1970s saw their share of emotions: fear and hope and doubt and defiance and determination. As the Black Consciousness Movement increasingly confronted the state, its ideas-cum-ideology were buffeted by powerful forces that activists could not control, especially banning and death. It was one thing to preach faith in a “distant horizon”; it was quite another thing to keep faith that the costs would be worth it. Soon after attending SASO’s organizational meeting in December 1968, Carl Mogale, a UCM activist, wrote to Barney Pityana from Kimberley. Mogale’s activities had caught the eye of the local police force. The police “give me no rest,” he told Pityana, and “it is generally known in Kimberley that either I am a ‘Commie’ or an ‘agent’ of the ‘Commies.’” Where we might have expected youthful defiance or bravado, the law’s attention in this case resulted in something else. “Barney, believe it or not, life is miserable for me down this end,” Mogale admitted. He expressed a litany of frustrations: “I have no parents, no home, no job, no money—agh!” Yet Mogale had not given up. Rather, he wrote, “I am only deflated and not defeated. There is hope although I don’t know where. Dawn will surely come.” He signed off on a suggestive note, telling 160 w฀ The Movement Pityana to “keep the faith baby!” In this one letter, a young South African activist ran a gamut of emotions, from near despair and strained frustration to cautious optimism reminiscent of the Zambian independence movement’s cries of “Kwacha! The dawn!” He admitted misery yet counseled faith. Such were activists’ experience of the 1970s—the morass of doubt mixed with the confidence that a change would come, in time.2 This chapter searches out such moments in order to stake a final claim to the intellectual history of this era by demonstrating how thinking changed in step with setbacks. It begins by considering the earliest “suffering” endured by 1970s thinkers and activists, associated with the banning of UCM leaders and the eventual dissolution of that organization in the face of both government pressure and internal discontent. Black Consciousness organizations learned a great deal from these experiences, and when the first SASO and BPC leaders were banned in 1973, the organizations reacted by renewing their faith in fundamental change in spite of evidence to the contrary. This observation points to a further line of inquiry. Black Consciousness thinkers suggested that an emotion—fear—had long bedeviled the community and compounded its problems. “Fear . . . erodes the soul of black people in South Africa,” Biko wrote, and he and others cast it as the prime evil behind The Struggle’s loss of momentum in the 1960s.3 With this in mind, activists countered fear with hope. Hope thrives on a certain ignorance , Charles Taylor reminded us; it “can only exist if you are uncertain about a desired outcome,” and it is most potent when accompanied by an earnest effort to make it so.4 The future South Africans plotted was by no means assured, and this chapter watches as they struggled towards it realization. Nowhere was the relationship between suffering, hope, and the future more evident than in activists’ confrontations with death. Whether it involved a relatively well-known leader such as Tiro or Biko or an anonymous student like Hector Pietersen, each death challenged the Black Consciousness Movement to explain itself. The ideology of sacrifice that resulted was and still is debated. Disagreements aside, Black Consciousness dealt with death differently than previous liberation movements had.5 As bodies were piled upon bodies, activists’ initial attempts to explain what had happened had enduring effect. Given both the Movement’s pervasive religiosity and its particular emphasis on Christianity, it is not surprising...

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