Biko Lives

Abstract

Although movements are typically larger than their individual spokespersons, it is hard to imagine the Black Consciousness movement without the towering figure of Stephen Bantu Biko, who would have turned sixty in December 2007. The Black Consciousness movement breathed life into a people who had been cowered into submission by the brutality of white oppression in apartheid South Africa. By borrowing from the resistance that came before it—the anticolonial struggles on the African continent, philosophers and thinkers, and the Black power movement in the United States—Black Consciousness made resistance not only imaginable but possible. South Africa—and the course of the country’s liberation struggle—was never the same after Black Consciousness elicited the passion for a black-controlled, -defined, and -led project of liberation.KeywordsAfrican National CongressBlack Economic EmpowermentBlack LiberationBlack ConsciousnessApartheid StateThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.