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185 co ncl usion Yesterday Is a Foreign Country the quiet did not last. Soon after 19 October 1977, new organizations formed and new movements followed. There was the Azanian Peoples Organisation (AZAPO), followed by the rise of civic organizations. Next came trade unions, antitricameral parliament campaigns, and the United Democratic Front— which courted the old Black Consciousness constituency of Africans, Indians, and Coloureds and counted Movement veterans such as Allan Boesak among its leaders. Then there was the Mass Democratic Movement, soon followed by negotiations, elections, and a “new” South Africa. As AZAPO, Black Consciousness again mutated to fit changing circumstances; it outflanked the UDF’s apparent ANC-aligned multiracialism by going further left, to embrace a creed that combined the discourse of blackness, dignity, and adulthood with a more conventional “socialist” approach to South Africa’s problems. Symbols marked the transformation. In the early 1980s, a red star was affixed to the familiar black fist. The star, AZAPO explained, stood for “our hope that Black workers, whose blood has been spilled for our liberty, will lead the struggle, and will rule a free socialist Azania.”1 Where once the progression was from nonwhites to blacks, Black Consciousness in the wake of 1977 further winnowed the population—and workers were the blackest of them all. The 1980s are justly celebrated for the pressure, both internal and external, that activists and their allies exerted on the regime. Yet for some, the 1980s were the darkest years. Political identification by party rose in importance. Funerals abounded, but they were just as often sites of intense internecine conflict as they were sanctifications of the Struggle, the future, and its costs. Whether ANC, UDF, or AZAPO, party identification often trumped simply “being” for liberation. For some, this was a crushing disappointment. Upon her 186 w฀ Conclusion release from prison in the early 1980s, Bongi Mkhabela was met by AZAPO representatives, and “the first thing they wanted to know was which ideology am I going to embrace.” The machinations of such questions left her cold; they were too great a departure from Black Consciousness’s humanist roots. She ended up marrying AZAPO founder Ish Mkhabela, but the resentment lingered. “For many people this was not simply because two people love each other,” she wrote, “but was a political coup for Black Consciousness ideology .”2 Intensified conflict between opposition groups did add to the system’s overall instability, however. As the 1980s turned to the 1990s, death remained a constant, a fever pitch of suffering and sacrifice that, young activists were repeatedly assured, would be repaid a thousandfold when that last horizon passed. And in 1994, the new South Africa dawned. Or so the story goes. Having set the stage, it would be logical to follow events into the present and there join the critics who have rightly begun to question what 1994 meant. Enduring poverty, epidemic AIDS, endemic crime, superficial reconciliation , deep-running racial division, and flagging democracy—all these issues deserve criticism and have received it in spades. I hear and sympathize with writers such as Patrick Bond and Ashwin Desai, and I beg the reader to look to them for discussions of the present. Meanwhile in my few remaining pages, I shall pursue a different tack. Rather than lament the material conditions of the South African present, I want to consider once more the not explicitly political politics with which Black Consciousness began, to test how faith and beingness fare in the “new” South Africa. So then, with those thoughts in mind, I would ask, Has the horizon been passed? To take beingness first, we might offer a qualified yes. Much of urban South Africa today is a flurry of cultural and economic production, something that has been recently and brilliantly explored by, among others, Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall, who take Johannesburg as their context and the new South Africa as their interrogation.3 Nuttall in particular focuses on the shopping mall and demonstrates how a trip to Sandton City, Maponya Mall, Rosebank, or similar centers reveals a boldly modern society on the move. There, redoubts of “Afrochic ” package blends of so-called traditional African fashion sensibilities with township style. As part of this latter-day Black Consciousness, the 1970s Movement sells, whether in the form of hip, well-fitting T-shirts that feature the Drum cover announcing Biko’s death or in more cheaply produced but still stylish shirts decorated with Biko’s face, sold amid the Bob Marleys, Ches...

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