Document Type
Dissertation
Date of Award
6-2018
Keywords
Social sciences, African Liberation Movements, Apartheid, Armed struggle, Black Consciousness, Black Power, South Africa
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Sociology
First Advisor
Michael West
Subject Heading(s)
Social sciences; African Liberation Movements; Apartheid; Armed struggle; Black Consciousness; Black Power; South Africa; Sociology
Abstract
Many scholars have argued the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM)’s principal contribution was as an intellectual/student movement, and its main shortcoming the limited degree of active political and military opposition it was able to offer the apartheid regime. My dissertation, ‘Uncovering Hidden Fronts of Africa’s Liberation Struggle: Black Power, Black Consciousness, and South Africa’s Armed Struggle, 1967–1985’, broadens our understanding of this movement and moment in South African history by unearthing the little known history of BCM’s unrelenting engagement with armed struggle as a form of resistance to apartheid rule during the 1970s and 1980s.
The first part of my dissertation charts the evolution of Black Consciousness (BC) inspired organisations such as the Azanian People’s Liberation Front (APLF), the Isandlwana Revolutionary Effort (IRE), and the South African Youth Revolutionary Council (SAYRCO) from 1974–1982 as they organised for armed confrontation with the apartheid state. It then moves to a discussion of the Black Consciousness Movement of Azania (BCMA) and its armed wing the Azanian National Liberation Army (AZANLA) that emerged in the 1980s as the BC alternative to the non-racialist nominally socialist African National Congress of South Africa (ANC-SA) after previous movements failed to consolidate themselves. Their failures are less important than examinations of why they failed, which reveals their struggles were mostly caused by BCM being outmanoeuvred and betrayed by the ANC-SA and the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) in exile.
The second part of my dissertation excavates how many new recruits of the Soweto generation attempted to radicalize Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK) from within. While this is acknowledged by most MK scholars, they do not link this drive for radicalization with the politics of BC that a number of these recruits carried with them into the movement. From this perspective, the mutinies and internal suppressions that wracked MK during the 1980s need to be viewed as an internal ideological struggle for what the future of South Africa would look like.
Although my work offers a careful historical reconstruction of previously under-explored events, my thesis suggests BCM’s vision of a future South Africa/Azania, where land and resources would be redistributed to the masses, was outmanoeuvred and defeated by bourgeois liberal-democratic and South African Communist Party (SACP) forces of the ANC-SA. Returning to this history helps frame contemporary struggles South Africa finds itself in as current movements strive to find answers to continued racism and economic inequality. While BC did not have all the answers, it offered a different vision of freedom that Black activists today have rediscovered.
Recommended Citation
Asheeke, Toivo Tukongeni Paul Wilson, "Uncovering hidden fronts of Africa’s liberation struggle: Black power, black consciousness, and South Africa’s armed struggle, 1967-1985" (2018). Graduate Dissertations and Theses. 78.
https://orb.binghamton.edu/dissertation_and_theses/78