“Black Man You Are On Your Own”: Black Power And Black Consciousness

Abstract

Abstract World War II awakened or strengthened independence movements in Asia and Africa and reduced the capacity of the Western imperial powers to suppress them. Unlike India, Indonesia, and Vietnam, where the war ended leaving strong nationalist parties or guerrilla armies ready to challenge European hegemony, the African colonies of England and France remained quiet and seemingly under control in 1945. But progress toward decolonization elsewhere encouraged African nationalists to act on the assumption that independence was a realistic aspiration. Except where there was substantial European settlement or other special conditions (as in Kenya, Rhodesia, Algeria, and the Portuguese colonies), these hopes were fulfilled by the early 1960s without the need for sustained guerrilla warfare. The emergence of new African nations helped inspire the American civil rights movement, as well as the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. But the precise relationship of American and South African freedom struggles to the independence of black Africa and the Pan-African ideology that was associated with it was far from simple and straightforward. Were black Americans really Africans or had two or three centuries of exile and acculturation turned them into Americans? There could be no doubt about the Africanness of Bantu-speaking South Africans, but did the presence of substantial white and Indian settler minorities mean that a liberated South Africa could not be purely and simply African but would have to be a special kind of “multi-racial” or “nonracial” society? The 1950s saw a struggle within the African National Congress between the multi-racialists and the Africanists that ruptured the organization. In the late 1960s in the United States, advocates of Black Power and black nationalism challenged the integrationist ideology of the civil rights movement and gave new emphasis to African roots and identities. Shortly thereafter, the South African Black Consciousness movement borrowed some of the new African-American language of black pride and self determination to question in a new way the ANC’s insistent nonracialism. Both movements-Black Power and Black Consciousness-sought to encourage what Jean-Paul Sartre has called an “anti-racist racism”; they accepted the racial identity constructed for them by white oppressors and turned it against its creators by using it as a basis of solidarity and struggle against white domination.