Biko, Hegel and the End of Black Consciousness: A Historico-Philosophical Discourse on South African Racism

Abstract

Black Consciousness, as seminally constructed by Steve Biko as a political philosophy of struggle against apartheid racism, has been subjected to a wide range of explications, which, in the main, have been from a perspective shaped by political activism. Here, in a deliberately philosophical project, we demonstrate how the rational structure of Black Consciousness is shaped by Biko’s employment of the Hegelian dialectical form as an analytical tool. We highlight the critical conceptual value of ‘black solidarity’, which Biko posits as the antithetical moment, in line with the Hegelian triad. This doctrine of the self-exclusion and grouping of black people against inter-racial alliances has hitherto been submerged under the emphasis on Biko’s evocative utterances on the liberation of the black mind from slave mentality. We point out how this analytical framework, which adopts black solidarity as the antithesis to white racism, eventuates in a logical contradiction of Biko’s vision that Black Consciousness would lead to a universal non-racial consciousness, ‘true humanity’. Our claim is that this logical defect, in corroboration of Hegelian rationality, translates into a defective and ineffective political praxis.