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26 2 w฀ “Black man, you are on your own!” Black Students, White Liberals, and Adulthood By 1968, black students’ displeasure with white dominance of student politics led first to blacks-only meetings, and then to the creation of the exclusively black student organization SASO. Years later, John Sebidi, a Catholic priest and SASO supporter, described that organization’s founding as “a hefty attempt at severing . . . the ‘psychological umbilical cord’ that held the black man to the slow-moving liberal band-wagon.”1 All told, this severing took about a year, starting with a blacks-only caucus in 1968 and culminating with the inauguration of the new organization, with Steve Biko as its first president, in 1969. Many of the people discussed in chapter 1 participated in this process, and many more were attracted not only to the political theater of rejecting white liberals but also to later iterations of what that meant.2 After all, Sebidi’s image does more than sketch a political transition; it speaks of a transformation that was both a birth and about being an adult, being able to stand on one’s own and reject infantilization at the hands of whites. In this chapter, I consider the break with white liberals and then explore the intellectual implications of the SASO slogan, coined by Barney Pityana, that gives this chapter its title. no more tea parti es In May 1968, NUSAS called a meeting to respond to racial tensions between the University of Natal’s Pietermaritzburg and Non-European campuses. At that meeting, UNNE representative Steve Biko was among NUSAS’s most vocal supporters. He rose in support of a resolution to disaffiliate from the whites-only Pietermaritzburg campus on the grounds that the latter’s decision to host a racially exclusive graduation was in violation of “the basic principal of the National Union which . . . [is] non-racialism.”3 Biko represented black “Black man, you are on your own!” w 27 students—nonwhites in the parlance of the time—whose numbers could not dent whites’ dominance over student affairs. At this meeting, they clung to the status quo of 1960s opposition politics. Faced with racialism, a rejection of the liberal’s multiracial ideal, Biko and his SRC pledged “to continue to work relentlessly for the realisation . . . of the principles for which the National Union stands.” It was, Saths Cooper later put it, testament to the “single common characteristic amongst both black and white student leaders of the time . . . the rejection of racism and the common fear of being branded as racist.” To be politically legitimate meant being “colourless.”4 Yet “colourlessness” had its problems. Black students made up an increasingly large proportion of the national student body, but NUSAS remained, in Craig Charney’s evocative phrase, a “black body with a white brain.” Its white leaders supported worthy causes, “ideas such as academic freedom, the rule of law, human rights as contained in the UN Charter, etc.,” but their claims to speak on behalf of the disenfranchised majority were more problematic.5 This situation could not stand—especially at the end of the 1960s, the decade of African independence, which, despite setbacks in southern Africa, had seen the emergence of strong, self-possessed leaders across the continent. Nyerere, Nkrumah, Kenneth Kaunda, and others—all of their ideas were available; there was “a whole host of heroes we identified with,” Biko remembered.6 These were leaders of independent countries, self-confident men who did not just parrot the UN Charter but actually controlled seats in the UN General Assembly . If they had cut off the far thicker colonial umbilical cord, surely nonwhite South African students could do the same. The white leaders who had supported the UNNE’s protest against racialism were predictably appalled by blacks students’ decision just a few months later to meet without them. After Duncan Innes, NUSAS’s president, protested to Biko, the latter responded gently, stating only that NUSAS had “neglected” nonwhite centers and that nonwhites wanted a place to talk in private. He went on to assure Innes that the meeting was in no way a rejection of “the healthy and liberal ideas that [have] been made by student leaders in this country.”7 Indeed, SASO’s early communiqués seemed to apologize for the organization’s existence. “SASO is not a national union and has never claimed to be one,” Biko wrote in December 1969; it offered “no competition” to NUSAS. Instead , the nascent organization claimed only the desire...

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