At the tender age of seventeen, Khotso Seatlholo’s fiery words quoted above during the Soweto Uprising of 1976–1977 captured the tone, tenor and tenaciousness of a new generation of African guerrillas emerging in 1970s South Africa. While aware of the contributions previous organisations like the African National Congress of South Africa (ANC) and Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) had made to the struggle against apartheid, Seatlholo and his comrades believed they had done all they could do. It was time for new leadership to fight against, ‘the WHITE FASCIST MINORITY GOVERNMENT OF JOHN VORSTER and his gang of pro-Nazi Ministers’.Footnote ² Continuing on, Seatlholo stated, ‘Our whole being rebels against the whole South African system of existence, the system of apartheid that is killing us psychologically and physically.’Footnote ³ As members of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) this new wave of activists attempted to transform themselves into the vanguard of the national and wider Pan-African struggle against white settler colonialism.

Seatlholo, like many Black South Africans at the time not in university, had his first sustained exposure to Black Consciousness through the Literacy Programs of BCM in the early 1970s.Footnote ⁴ Building on these early lessons, Seatlholo and others like Tsietsi Mashinini brought this new political orientation forged in the Soweto township high schools through organisations like the South African Students Movement (SASM), various debate teams and youth/cultural organisations to the mainstream discourse. SASM was central to the growing political consciousness of youths across the country and was a space where early planning for the 16th June 1976 Soweto march would take place. After white police opened fire on unarmed protesting Black children and teenagers, young organisers like Seatlholo and Mashinini utilised the lessons learned in BCM to transform themselves and their organisations into township guerrillas during the rebellions of 1976 and 1977.Footnote ⁵

The ANC and PAC had a limited presence inside South Africa at the time as most of their members and leaders were either in exile or prison. Moreover, attempts to build an effective underground while dogged were minimally influential to the political currents of the time.Footnote ⁶ Given this, the township youths formed the Soweto Students Representative Council (SSRC) to better coordinate the youth rebellion with the wider Black community. As Soweto burned and the incarceration and death tolls of youths fighting continued to rise, activists and at times waged workers from across the country took to the streets to challenge the institutions and injustices of the apartheid regime.Footnote ⁷ By 1977, a national Black Power rebellion against the white supremacist regime had been triggered which in hindsight signalled the eventual fall in 1994 of legalised white settler colonialism in South Africa.

Yet, at the time, the counter-insurgency capabilities of the apartheid war machine were exceptional in their brutality and ruthless in their methods and the rebellion was eventually suppressed. As state-sanctioned violence increased key SSRC leaders like Seatlholo and Mashinini were forced to follow in the footsteps of countless African guerrillas and maroons before them and flee into exile. While abroad, they formed the South African Youth Revolutionary Council (SAYRCO) in 1979 which attempted to build an armed political organisation in exile which would return home to win freedom through the barrel of the gun. While it did not succeed in executing sustained armed actions against the apartheid regime, its very founding demonstrated the ability of Black Consciousness organising to find concrete political expression within the armed sections of the liberation struggle. For Nosipho Matshoba, one of the founding members of SAYRCO, organising this armed wing was important because ‘people did not want to go through the ANC … they didn’t want to go through PAC … So the only way to do this was to form a different liberation movement’.Footnote ⁸

Unfortunately, our knowledge of SAYRCO and other armed wings influenced by Black Consciousness is scant at best. In the rich historiographies of South Africa’s liberation struggle, it is the ANC and its armed wing Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK) which hold pride of place. The history of the ruling party has become synonymous with and indivisible from the fight against apartheid rule.Footnote ⁹ This has left little space for other narratives, visions and political projects not aligned with the ANC or the wider Congress tradition to find concrete expression in the literature. As it pertains to Black Consciousness, many scholars have argued its principal contribution was as an intellectual/student movement and its main shortcoming was the limited degree of active political and military opposition it was able to offer the apartheid regime. Arming Black Consciousness: The Azanian Black Nationalist Tradition and South Africa’s Armed Struggle, 1967–1993, challenges this narrative. Grounded in a careful analysis of numerous primary and secondary sources as well as oral interviews and memoirs, my research has unearthed a rich history of BCM’s unrelenting engagement with armed struggle as a form of resistance to white settler colonialism.

Unlike other revolutionary guerrilla struggles across the Third World and Africa, none of the armed wings of the various South African movements built the capacity to engage in sustained armed confrontations against the apartheid war machine. In the early 1990s, MK Chief of Staff Chris Hani stated, ‘the military achievement of MK cannot remotely be compared to those of the liberation armies in Cuba, Vietnam and Zimbabwe. We never liberated and administered territory, arms in hand.’Footnote ¹⁰ Instead, the MK commander compared themselves with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in terms of its style of confrontation. Moreover, Hani lamented the reality that ‘MK on its own has never developed the ability to adequately defend our people’.Footnote ¹¹ Outside of the occasional death of a white settler (mostly through Poqo in the mid-1960s) and some police/military personnel (generally through MK activities in the 1980s), white lives and property went mostly unharmed.

Nevertheless, the importance of South Africa’s armed struggle to the fall of apartheid was and in certain spaces still is touted by the ANC and some scholarship as being central to the fall of apartheid rule.Footnote ¹² Others have argued it was relatively marginal to the eventual demise of the white supremacist Nasionale Party (NP) in the April 1994 elections and was overemphasised during the years in exile. There are even questions around whether an armed overthrow of the state was ever the goal of the ANC/MK as thousands of its trained combatants never saw battle inside South Africa.Footnote ¹³

If this is the case, why is excavating BCM’s armed struggle against the white settler colonialist state important? According to Thandika Zondo, an Azanian National Liberation Army (AZANLA) veteran, ‘We need the world to be told the truth. We need people to know they [ANC] were not the only ones who were fighting, we were also in the struggle, in as much as we are still struggling now.’Footnote ¹⁴ The lack of attention paid to Black Consciousness’s attempts at armed struggle and its history in exile has seen the sacrifices and struggles of its members marginalised. Consequently, it has been the worldview of the Congress tradition that has shaped the socio-economics and much of the mainstream culture and political direction of South Africa post-1994. This book troubles this hegemonic worldview by offering a historiography of what some scholars and activists have called the Azanian Black Nationalist Tradition, represented by the BCM, being built during South Africa’s liberation struggle.Footnote ¹⁵

Through this perspective, my book expands and deepens our understanding of the BCM prior to 1994. For some, a discussion about Black Consciousness, armed struggle and exile seems strange. In the literature we have available to us, there is hardly any mention of this history outside of in a few scattered places. In many of the accounts of the more internationally known figures of BCM like Steve Biko and Ramphele Mamphela, there is little, if any, discussion of this history.Footnote ¹⁶ In Biko’s famous SASO 9 trial testimony, he avoids giving a direct answer about whether his organisation was engaged in armed struggle or not. At the same time, he rejected any notion that BCM was a front for the ANC or PAC or recruiting members for their armed wings.Footnote ¹⁷

My research shows that Biko was correctly not being forthright in his testimony. In reality, he was aware of something happening among BCM cadres in Botswana in the mid-1970s as it pertains to armed struggle. In an interview with Ranwedzi Nengwekhulu, one of those who was around cadres attempting to build this new wing of the movement in Botswana, he mentioned that he kept Biko informed of things when he could via phone.Footnote ¹⁸ Despite this knowledge, in part due to the fractures that existed among the South African liberation movements, Biko did not believe armed revolution would work as a means to overthrow apartheid. He had also been against the protests in support of Onkgopotse Tiro in 1972, the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO) rallies in 1974 and the Soweto protests in June 1976 as he felt these actions would invite state repression before BCM was strong enough to withstand it.Footnote ¹⁹ Some would argue Biko was correct.

Others in the growing movement took a different and no less revolutionary view. This was nothing to lament as for the founding activists of Black Consciousness, a diversity of thought and action was encouraged and nourished in order to push BCM to grow in new and dynamic ways. One of them being what many felt was the logical conclusion to their rapidly increasing confrontations with the state, the return to armed struggle. Sam Nolutshungu, one of the few scholars to acknowledge the seriousness of armed struggle as a political strategy within BCM prior to June 1976, points out that Black Consciousness,

Continuing on he wrote, ‘The necessity of freedom imposed the obligation of violence, and the recognition of both was essentially a radicalising process in ideological terms as well.’Footnote ²¹ This matches what this book has uncovered in the process of my research. As much of the literature has focused on Biko, who is pivotal to understanding Black Consciousness, other significant dimensions and undercurrents of the movement which he did not take centre stage in have been overlooked.

Arming Black Consciousness recuperates and rehabilitates some of these shattered histories and hidden voices in order to reconstruct an expanded history of BCM as part of the wider Azanian Black Nationalist Tradition. Many of the revolutionaries it centres such as Bokwe Mafuna, Thandika Zondo, “Skaap” Motsau and Pitso Hlasa are not well known. Most of them were not university-trained cadres. Instead, they came from working poor backgrounds, which made it hard for them to obtain formal higher education. Others like Welile Nhlapo and Nosipho Matshoba decided university education was not for them as their time would be better utilised as full-time organisers. Scholar Ndumiso Dladla has correctly pointed out that many within the Azanian Philosophical Tradition were far more than ‘simply academics. They were soldiers, activists, organizers, lawyers, and freedom fighters who distilled their thought in the process of the engagement of struggle.’Footnote ²²

The activism and activity of these lesser-known guerrillas created and shaped BCM’s liberation struggle and provided it with an expanded and arguably more concrete vision of what the movement needed to mean in the day-to-day lives of the wretched of South Africa’s earth. This enriched Black Consciousness’s political praxis which helped bring it, especially while in exile, into closer contact with the wider Third World Revolution.Footnote ²³ Operating within the Cold War, BCM’s various armed wings represented a radical Black Nationalist vision of change and transformation for South Africa, or as they called it Azania, as its armed activists prepared for revolution.

If this book is successful, it will have opened a new avenue to understand South African historiography which moves us away from liberal, European Marxist and ANC/Congress centric versions of South Africa’s liberation history.Footnote ²⁴ By doing so, a fuller and more dynamic understanding of how Black South Africans responded to racist colonial oppression can be constructed. Moreover, for the contemporary moment, this work suggests Azanian Black Nationalist inspired struggles in South Africa against poverty, white monopoly capital, corruption, gender-based violence and racism are the continuation of some of these lesser celebrated political projects. Although activists like Khotso Seatlholo did not have all the answers to South Africa’s problems, they offered an idea of freedom that Black activists today have rediscovered.

Exclusion/Domination, the Haitian Revolution and the Black Radical Tradition

More broadly, this book offers a new framework to understand Africa’s decolonisation struggle and the liberatory traditions it produced in the post-WWII period. Ideologically, liberation movements in Africa have been divided into radical or conservative organisations with Marxism–Leninism or Maoism seen as the ideological orientation of the former.Footnote ²⁵ Conservative organisations have generally been identified as being either Black Nationalist/narrowly racialist, ethno-nationalist, irrationally emotional and reverse-racist.Footnote ²⁶ This construction of the ideas and practices of Black Nationalism as being conservative, or at best a transitionary phase towards a “higher” non-racialist class consciousness, has hindered a closer reading of the ways in which it has been and still is a viable political force for revolution in Africa since the earliest days of the European slave trade, enslavement on the continent and colonial rule. A closer look at the primary sources clearly shows Black Nationalism to be organic to African masses fighting white settler colonialism, not only as a fighting praxis of Africans in the diaspora. Hence, far from a foreign import or insufficient ideological current, this book agrees with and wishes to expand on Hashi Tafira’s argument that,

As Tafira has correctly stated, this tradition of thought and material struggle has a long history in Azania.Footnote ²⁸ From the moment Europeans invaded the southern tip of Africa, there were different ideas on how to react. As the European colonial project violently expanded some fled, others were forced to assimilate and still others chose to stand their ground and resist through armed struggle and/or non-violent direct action. By the nineteenth century, connections between the Azanian Black Nationalist tradition and the wider Black International began to take shape more concretely. This development was paralleled and resisted by a global white supremacist project Gerald Horne has meticulously sketched out in his recent book on the region.Footnote ²⁹ Nevertheless, Africans throughout the diaspora and continent forged ways to ideologically and organisationally connect to the growing Azanian struggle. This took the form of the Ethiopianism movement, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church,Footnote ³⁰ Garveyism and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), Black Communists and the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU) to name but a few.Footnote ³¹

Unquestionably, African resistance movements to European/Euro-North American slavery and colonialism pre-dates the entry of Marxism–Leninism as a tool for liberation in human history. Much of the literature on the African liberation movements fails to take this seriously in an ideological sense. At best these movements are seen as mere extensions of USSR radicalism in Africa, or African Marxist–Leninists/African Maoists, rather than also understood and respected from within the revolutionary traditions within their own lived experiences.Footnote ³² Cedric Robinson, the founding scholar-activist of the concept of the Black Radical Tradition, has reminded us that while Marxism at times positively impacted the struggle of African peoples against European domination, it did not define or fuel it or even fully understand it. While undeniably being a radical tradition whose bravery and clearness of thought is to be respected, it emerged out of the social/cultural/material conditions of Europe. Consequently, it was far from unlimited in its ability to offer effective blueprints of freedom for much of the world suffering under European domination.Footnote ³³

For Robinson, the ability of the African masses to recreate their lives and resist amid oppression and exploitation, colonialism and slavery, was the ‘raw material of the Black radical tradition’. Building on Amilcar Cabral and his exceptional analysis on national liberation and culture Robinson continued by arguing, ‘it was the materials constructed from a shared philosophy developed in the African past and transmitted as culture, from which revolutionary consciousness was realized and the ideology of struggle formed’.Footnote ³⁴ Moreover, through its,

Popular memory and scholarship of Africa’s liberation historiography has not been kind to the Black Radical Tradition. Given the limitations of the European socialist/radical project, the literature on the African Liberation Movements are generally trapped in narratives (either critical or supportive) of the victors (e.g., mainstream liberation organisations like ANC, SWAPO, ZANU and FRELIMO) instead of an excavation of the diverse possibilities for change and transformation the decolonisation struggle opened. In order to move beyond these victor historiographies, as well as merely pitting Azanian Black Nationalism/Black Radical Tradition vs European Marxism–Leninism, which is of limited use, this book proposes we distinguish between tendencies within the liberation struggle whose raison d’etre was either exclusion or domination.

Those in the former, generally the leadership of organisations such as the ANC/Congress tradition, understood themselves as fighting against the exclusion of Africans from political/economic power of the nation-state and wider international system. They sought an aggressive inclusion into or reform of the colonial system/structure for liberation to be achieved. This inclusion would take place by either winning the right to vote (free and fair elections) or seizing state power through force of arms (Marxist–Leninist revolution). Once in state power, some liberation movements believed they would be in a better position to act on the needs of the masses and transform the conditions of inequality colonialism created. Eventually, the vanguard party would create the conditions within which the state would wither away.Footnote ³⁶

For other organisations, they conceptualised Africans as being dominated by the colonial system/structure. A complete material and ideological burning down of the system was required for a true liberation to be built from its ashes. Capturing state power was never seen as an essential condition for this liberation to be realised. This tradition prioritised the immediate return of land and resources, economic redistribution, reparations and the socio-cultural-spiritual reorientation of the new society to one grounded in radical working-class African material cultures of living and existing. In the context of Azania, it was understood one could win state power and still not redistribute land and wealth which would make the freedom struggle unfinished.

This framing of exclusion versus domination was inspired by my engagement with the political scientist Adom Getachew and her critical literature review on the scholarship of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804).Footnote ³⁷ Getachew argues that ‘Instead of interpreting the Haitian Revolution through the lens of the truncated universalism of human rights, I propose a reading that preserves the specificity of the Haitian Revolution.’Footnote ³⁸ The Haitian Revolution, which arguably brought to independence one of Africa’s first states in the diaspora (perhaps Palmares in Brazil was the first), like other moments within the Black Radical Tradition, has historically been epistemologically trapped within the universalisms of Europe and its revolutions. What makes Getachew’s intervention thought provoking is her attempt to read the Haitian Revolution along the lines suggested by one of its foremost scholars, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, outside of the rubric of Euro-North American human rights and revolution.Footnote ³⁹

She does this by arguing the African peoples of the colony of Saint Domingue were not fighting to be included in the European Universalist project. Instead, they were striving for a recreation of their own African ways of life in the Caribbean. This weltanschauung was born and baptised from the reality of African enslavement and colonisation in which they were not being excluded by Europeans from the global system but were dominated by it as chattel. In ways echoing an argument made by CLR James earlier, Africans as chattel were central to the birthing of capitalism as a world-system. James would further argue in his seminal work Black Jacobins that these labourers, shaped under the conditions of the industrialised and racialised sugar plantation economy, became the world’s first proletariat.Footnote ⁴⁰ Building on this Getachew writes, ‘These sites of domination – the plantation, race, and imperialism – constituted the political grounds from which the [Haitian] revolution emerged and … were also the terrain on which alternative visions of the universal were formulated.’Footnote ⁴¹

Getachew’s works have attempted to carve a new space for the imagining of Black freedom movements away from the centrality of the French Revolution in the creation of anti-systemic/radical social movements.Footnote ⁴² My analysis pushes this further by arguing we must distinguish between different political tendencies operating among the African guerrillas of the Haitian revolution. This reading is inspired by the work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot and more recently Crystal Eddins in her book Rituals, Runaways, and the Haitian Revolution.Footnote ⁴³ For some in the leadership such as Toussaint Louverture, André Rigaurd, Henri Christophe and Alexander Pétion incorporation into the global system was the vision of change they were fighting for. For them, partly due to their relatively higher socio-economic status prior to the revolution and their cultural indebtedness to France, the French revolution and its promises were appealing, they saw themselves as black Jacobins who would force a radical inclusion into France post-revolution.Footnote ⁴⁴

On the other hand, most of the enslaved population and the maroons of Saint Domingue rejected or cared little for incorporation into the global system. For them and their representatives such as Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Sans Souci, Cécile Fatima and Boukman Dutty (all former field slaves and/or maroons and probably African born), they understood the African condition, materially and culturally, to be rooted in domination. They sought a clean break from the growing capitalist world-system ideologically and epistemologically and wanted a recreation of their diverse African political and social realities in Haiti. This explains some of the revolts and strikes which took place across Saint Domingue by the emancipated Africans against Toussaint from roughly 1794 to 1802 as he attempted to force them back onto the sugar plantations. Even one of his most friendly biographers, CLR James, points out that Toussaint could not see a free future for his people without and beyond France, consequently, by 1802 the revolution had passed him by.Footnote ⁴⁵

Eddins offers a fresh rubric through which the Haitian Revolution can be a read. Her work provides us with innovative conceptual and methodological tools for deeper and more nuanced readings of African and African Diaspora social movements. Through her careful research and engagement with the Black Radical Tradition, she humanises the enslaved Africans by detailing the languages, rituals, ethnic groups, nations, traditions, kinship networks, religious practices/beliefs, skills, reproductive justice projects and social structures they brought with them from Africa. Expanding on Robinson, she shows how the violence unleashed by European directed African slave raiding and the trans-Atlantic slave trade drastically reshaped life on the continent as societies and people were violently forced to adjust. Within the logic of the cultural matrices of the different African societies and peoples on the continent, some found ways to co-exist and thrive while others fled, took up arms, or found ways to resist under the new disposition in subtle and overt ways. These traditions of co-existence and resistance travelled with the Africans as they were captured and sent in chains to the plantations of the “New World.” There, grounding with Native American/Taino-Arawak traditions of struggle against European slavery and colonialism, the Black Radical Tradition incorporated new strategies and tactics of resistance which created innovative cultures of revolution. These cultures were found strongest, and consequentially utilised more, among the enslaved on the plantations and the maroons operating across the colony who were not as tied materially and socio-culturally to Europe. In the context of South Africa/Azania, I argue Black Consciousness as part of the Azanian Black Nationalist tradition represented a comparable revolutionary tendency.

The Haitian Revolution and the concepts of exclusion and domination offers an important but under-utilised rubric to analyse Africa’s dynamic and diverse decolonisation struggles.Footnote ⁴⁶ Far more than other events during the Age of Revolutions, it resembles African decolonisation struggles of the twentieth century the most especially as it pertains to questions around race, class, gender, colourism, African culture and racial capitalism. By returning to the source, in this case the revolution of the enslaved in Saint Domingue, new tools and concepts are available to provide new perspectives on the African Liberation struggles.

In addition to the Haitian Revolution, my thinking on the Black Radical Tradition has been influenced by the histories and debates on Black Power in the United States and Caribbean. Among some at the time a broad consensus was reached that organisations and activists had to evolve from Black Power to Marxism–Leninism in order to develop the struggle further. As Brian Meeks argued in the context of Black Power in the Caribbean, not only did this entail an ideological shift from the race to the class question but an organisational transformation as well. The former position corresponding with a less hierarchically structured organisation built from the grassroots towards one in which power/decision-making was centralised amongst a cadre of dedicated vanguard leadership.Footnote ⁴⁷ The Black Panthers, particularly the Oakland wing lead by Huey P. Newton, would by the early 1970s describe its political evolution in similar terms.Footnote ⁴⁸ This framework would also shape how many African liberation movements, especially those aligned with the USSR such as the ANC, would understand their own political evolution.Footnote ⁴⁹

This book disturbs this formulation as being necessary towards the creation of a revolutionary project. It demonstrates how movements aligned to an Azanian Black Nationalist vision based in domination, in this case Black Consciousness, maintained and produced a revolutionary vision of change and transformation that had always taken the class question seriously. This is not to say it did not engage with and/or incorporate aspects of Marxist theory and Marxist–Leninist revolutionary praxis at different points in time. They did, however, the shape and fuel for the struggle came from the world history of African resistance and resilience to European slavery, colonialism and racial capitalism. This perspective, operating from the position of domination, was often in closer alignment with the dreams and aspirations of various layers/sections of the suffering masses of South Africa/Azania.

To give a concrete example to better elucidate the point, let us return briefly to Steve Biko and the SASO 9 Trial. According to Biko, when Black Consciousness activists began organising in a new area you had to ingratiate yourself with the communities you wanted to work with. This meant ‘where the community congregates and talks freely … You are there just to listen to the things that they are talking about, and also to the words that are being used, the themes being important there’. Among the working people of Azania, Biko noticed you constantly heard ‘protest talk’. This was essentially ‘talk about the situation of oppression that the Black man is exposed to’.Footnote ⁵⁰ In these spaces, white society was roughly and constantly condemned in clear racial terms. Continuing on, Biko pointed out that, ‘when people speak in the townships they do not talk about the Provincial Council or City Councils, they talk about Whites, and of course the connotation there is with reference to obvious structures, but to them it is just Whites’.Footnote ⁵¹

This perceptive analysis of language, discourse, race, racism and systemic power is crucial to grasp. It is strikingly comparable to how revolutionaries during the Haitian Revolution and later in the Black Power movement described and defined their struggle (as well as the many struggles in-between). Black Consciousness saw itself as more accurately radiating and representing this collective consciousness of the Black people of Azania. On the other hand, key elements in organisations like the ANC and South African Communist Party (SACP) saw themselves as needing to channel this “raw energy” into a “higher plane” of political consciousness in order to take and maintain state power. This book takes the position of Black Consciousness seriously and excavates, from its perspective, how it attempted to activate these politics as it built armed wings in exile.

This book also brings to the forefront of this liberation movement narrative – through socialist feminist and Black feminist/womanist scholarship – the experiences, politics, activism and struggles of Black women who joined BCM.Footnote ⁵² African women have always been part and parcel of guerrilla struggles on the continent and in the diaspora. Scholars like Shireen Hassim, Susan Geiger, Stephanie Urdang and Cora Ann Presly, to mention only a few, have carefully uncovered how African nationalist movements and political projects were conceptualised, organised and mobilized by women from the beginning.Footnote ⁵³ Their activism and activity as gendered, raced and colonised subjects meant they generally did not organise solely as women. Deborah King has argued Black women in revolutionary struggles as well as societies shaped by colonialism as a racist, classist and heterosexist project suffer from multiple jeopardies.Footnote ⁵⁴ King utilises the concept of multiple jeopardy to refer, ‘not only to several simultaneous oppressions but to multiplicative relationships among them as well’.Footnote ⁵⁵ This flows well with Hassim’s point that women’s identities cannot be disaggregated from their roles as workers, teachers, nurses, farm-workers etc. and so they often mobilise around various issues without always claiming to be a women’s movement.Footnote ⁵⁶ Many found formal/national/international political expression through the liberation struggle. Instead of calling them feminists in the more mainstream sense of the term Ula Taylor, writing on the UNIA, has argued that in specific political, temporal and social contexts Black women’s political work for liberation should be seen as community feminism.Footnote ⁵⁷ Community feminists for Taylor are

In much of the published record and popular memory this rich political activism, praxis and tangible material involvement in revolution by women was and is marginalised and devalued. In the first instance, especially with armed struggle, sexism and hetero-patriarchy as institutions have lead movements and scholars to over-emphasise the importance of picking up the gun. Simultaneously, the sexism inherent in European colonialism as a process socialised many of the oppressed into believing women were not effective physical fighters like men, or, felt it emasculated men to have women fight with/for them. In addition to this, flowing from some of the privileging of limited understandings of the labour of armed self-defence, other forms of activity/labour required for revolutionary movements to be healthy and successful such as administrative/secretarial work, cultural work, healthcare, literacy projects, childcare, community projects, education, land cultivation, household labour, reproductive labour and overall nurturing work (to name a few) were/are usually gendered as women’s work and incorrectly valued less than other labours of liberation.Footnote ⁵⁹

This has had the impact of degrading the labour of women and men in these spaces which limited the liberation movements at the time and how we understand them today. Nevertheless, despite society’s pressures, many women did join armed wings as community feminists struggling through multiple jeopardies. For them, armed struggle was another aspect of their liberation struggle.Footnote ⁶⁰ Many experienced a far more difficult time than men who chose to pick up arms and this book, emphasising the oral record which is essential to centring the lived experiences of Black women, listens closely when the sources allow and reads them critically at all times. If the Azanian Black Nationalist Tradition is to mean anything of substance, Black feminist/womanist and socialist feminist perspectives (to name but a few) must be understood to be part of its very essence as a method, theory and praxis.

Review of the Literature on Black Consciousness, Black Power and South Africa’s Armed Struggle

In 1973, Chabani Manganyi briefly introduced a discussion on Black Consciousness’s political philosophy in his book Being-Black in the World. While this work was not exclusively about the movement and its political evolution, his book tapped into its political philosophy to locate its conception of Blackness within sociological and psychological factors that went beyond merely reacting to white racism.Footnote ⁶¹ In that same year, activists in occupied South Africa, Basil Moore and Stanley Ntwasa, released an edited volume on Black Theology.Footnote ⁶² As this particular publication went to press Biko, Barney Pityana, Bokwe Mafuna and a number of other BC leaders were banned as the white settler colonial state began its repression of the movement. This text was a compilation of various essays, speeches and talks whose themes ranged from unpacking the philosophical and political characteristics and importance of Black Theology, to offering an early history of the formation and growth of SASO/BC of which it was intimately linked through the University Christian Movement (UCM).

This text also articulated a progressive Black feminist position as they critiqued the Bible for being sexist and centred the liberation of Black women as key for the movement going forward. They wrote, ‘Black Theology as it struggles to formulate a theology of liberation relevant to South Africa, cannot afford to perpetuate any form of domination, not even male domination. If its liberation is not human enough to include the liberation of women, it will not be liberation.’Footnote ⁶³ This thinking came out of the politics of the growing BCM and while in practice it left much to be desired, it demonstrates the breadth of radical political thinking that was happening from within this Black Nationalist space at a time when arguably other liberation movements were behind on this essential element of the struggle.

Gail Gerhart’s book Black Power in South Africa followed soon after and was one of the first to construct a broad historiography of the BCM within the wider context of Black South African opposition to apartheid since the 1940s.Footnote ⁶⁴ Gerhart’s early work argued that like the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), BCM represented what she termed a rebel tradition that developed within Black South African politics post-WW II. This tradition, according to Gerhart, argued Africans could only find freedom if they began to think African. In other words, ‘to define their own goals in terms of their own interests and priorities as an oppressed people’.Footnote ⁶⁵ It was a political tradition born in opposition to a “reformist” tradition personified best by the ANC and its Congress Alliance which believed in a gradualist approach to integration.

Around the same time Mokgethi Motlhabi and Sam Nolutshungu sought to clearly define the political ideology of Black Consciousness as opposed to the African Nationalism of the PAC it was often compared to. Their contributions are important, like that of Manganyi and Ntwasa, because theirs were attempts by Blacks to explain what the movement represented to the world.Footnote ⁶⁶ Importantly, they located a powerful class and anti-capitalist critique within the radical racial consciousness of BCM in ways others had not. According to Motlhabi, ‘Among the values of white society to be rejected was its exploitative nature which was seen as a result of capitalism.’Footnote ⁶⁷

Nolutshungu, whom we have met above, was concerned with exploring the development of Black Consciousness as a broad movement inside South Africa as an example of ‘the tendencies towards nationalist militancy and social radicalism that popular movements among Blacks invariably contain’. He went further than Motlhabi and built on Moore and Ntwasa by framing BCM as a revolutionary movement designed initially not to replace the ANC and PAC. Moreover, Nolutshungu was one of the first to discuss, albeit briefly, the discussions among activists in SASO on the question of armed struggle.

Shortly after the unbanning of the liberation movements by F.W. De Klerk in 1990 and the release of Nelson Mandela, a number of BC activists like Barney Pityana, Bokwe Mafuna and Mamphela Ramphele met in Harare, Zimbabwe, to discuss ways to effectively add BCM to the growing global and national discussion of South Africa’s freedom struggle.Footnote ⁶⁸ Working in conjunction with friendly scholars like Lindy Wilson, this meeting was able to lay the foundation for a seminal text on BCM in 1991 entitled Bounds of Possibility.Footnote ⁶⁹ This edited volume delved into the intricacies of BC’s ideology and the various political projects of the movement. As Nelson Mandela was rapidly becoming the global figure of anti-apartheid resistance, BCM activists and aligned intellectuals sought to insert the contributions of Steve Biko and BCM into the developing narrative on South Africa’s freedom struggle.Footnote ⁷⁰ Unlike earlier literature, in the chapters by Wilson and Ramphele, this edited volume began exploring the experiences of women in BCM and openly critiqued the patriarchy of male leaders like Biko.Footnote ⁷¹ Moreover, the authors sought to chart BCM’s continued impact within South Africa after the assassination of Biko in September 1977 and the banning of BCM organisations one month later.Footnote ⁷²

In the mid-1990s, Karis and Gerhart’s detailed historical and political analysis of BCM would return to a close engagement with the BCM.Footnote ⁷³ While still constructing the ANC as the logical culmination of over 100 years of Black political struggle, Gerhart’s work laid important foundations for the basis of understanding BCM and some of its various political projects and activists leading up to the Soweto Uprising. More recently, scholars like Tshepo Moloi, Anne Heffernan, Daniel Magaziner, Julian Brown and Leslie Hadfield have built on these early foundations and have enhanced our understanding of BCM’s evolution, student activism, theological interventions and rural/urban community programs.Footnote ⁷⁴ Andile Mngxitama and Nigel Gibson have focused on exploring the life, politics and legacies of the wider movement and Steve Biko prior to and post-1994.Footnote ⁷⁵ For these scholar-activists, BCM is explored with an eye towards unlocking ways for Azanians to better understand, critique and transform contemporary society.

The absence of systematic research on BCM’s armed struggle in the vast literature on South Africa’s freedom struggle and the literature on Black Consciousness is peculiar given a number of primary documents and secondary sources reference its existence.Footnote ⁷⁶ Former members of one of the first armed wings it formed in Botswana who later joined the ANC/MK, Welile Nhlapo and Tebogo Mafole, wrote a piece for the ANC on the development of Black Consciousness groups in exile from 1973 to 1976. This was followed by a report written by ANC underground activists Gadibone and Nguna who were assigned to spy on Black Consciousness groups in Botswana. Both reports are available in the ANC archives in the University of Fort Hare but have gone mostly uncited. Whereas both are useful as historical documents, neither provide detailed accounts of why armed wings that were precursors to SAYRCO, like the Azanian People’s Liberation Front (APLF) formed, grew, fell and impacted the decolonisation movement.

The next fleeting engagement with this topic came from Mosibudi Mangena’s first autobiography in which he mentions his own discovery of the APLF. Prior to becoming President of the Black Consciousness Movement of Azania (BCMA) and attempting to form a new armed wing in the 1980s, he had little knowledge of this formation.Footnote ⁷⁷ A few years later Nhlapo, Thenjiwe Mtintso and Keith Mokoape – all former Black Consciousness activists who joined the ANC – wrote a chapter summarising the movement’s contributions to South Africa’s armed struggle in Bounds of Possibility.Footnote ⁷⁸ Bavusile Maaba and Mbulelo Vizikhungo have written on the activities of the BCMA in exile but have mostly focused on the negotiations between them and the ANC in exile and some of the disagreements within the movement. In 2016, Mosibudi Mangena released an updated autobiography where he marginally expands on his earlier engagement with the APLF but spends most of his time unpacking the rich history of the Azanian National Liberation Army (AZANLA), the BCMA’s armed wing, in the 1980s.Footnote ⁷⁹

At the same time, centring the exile experience, newer social histories on South Africa’s armed struggle have emerged offering fresh insights into the inner workings and missions of MK and the PAC’s armed wing the Azanian People’s Liberation Army (APLA).Footnote ⁸⁰ Recent literature has also attempted to sketch the regional/transnational nature of the liberation struggle. This has been an important development because it shows how interconnected the decolonisation movement needed to be given the non-state bound character of colonial-capitalist exploitation and repression. While these new insights have added depth and complexity to our grasp of the uneven development of South Africa’s armed struggle, none have engaged in a sustained excavation of BCM’s armed struggle.Footnote ⁸¹

Arming Black Consciousness also locates itself as an alternative way to critique and question African liberation movements currently in power. In recent works from scholars such as Christian Williams, John Saul and Stephen Ellis, readers are sometimes left believing there is little difference between hundreds of years of white settler colonial repression and the anti-colonial movements now in power.Footnote ⁸² Saul essentially believes the liberation movements did not take class analysis seriously enough; Williams is close to this but focuses more on tribalism, corruption and repressive structures which developed in exile; and Ellis posits groups like the ANC were too influenced by the Stalinism of the USSR and its allies. While significantly opening spaces to engage with the repressive histories of the liberation movements, this book offers a different route to understand contemporary issues.

While writings on Black Internationalism/Black Power have praised and incorporated the political action of Steve Biko and the rebellion of the Soweto students into its canon, they too have overlooked attempts by BCM elements to form armed wings. There has been a healthy growth of literature tracing the global dimensions of the Black Power movement during the Long 1960s. Some of the most exciting works have shown how it inspired activists in places like New Zealand, India, Canada, the Caribbean and the United Kingdom to use their identities as a site of resistance to oppression. We also have work exploring the important connections radicals from the African diaspora forged with the African continent and many of its movements.Footnote ⁸³

Few have explored how during decolonisation in the middle of the twentieth century, Black Nationalism radiated powerfully from within the African liberation movements.Footnote ⁸⁴ Looking at Africa and its interlocution with radical currents in its diaspora helps provide a more expansive reading of the nature and importance of Black Power and African liberation to the post-WWII decolonisation moment. Scholars like Peniel Joseph constrict the revolutionary nature of Black Power to the US borders. For Joseph, the activism and activity of figures like Stokely Carmichael in Africa after the 1960s is seen as a repudiation of his earlier “real” work in the American South.Footnote ⁸⁵ Through this lens, Black Power is fashioned as a contribution to the building of a radical democratic US vision instead of an anti-colonial, anti-racist and anti-capitalist project. Other Black Power scholars such as Ashley Farmer and Akinyele Umoja offer excellent and ground-breaking insurgent readings of this radical movement, while they are aware of Africa and its importance to Black Power, as their main emphasis is Afro-America, movements on the African continent which were Black Nationalist are understandably not the object of focus.Footnote ⁸⁶ If this can be revisited, the temporal boundaries of the Long 1960s should be rethought and Black Power’s place within Africa’s decolonisation struggle can be re-examined.

Taken together, this book addresses holes in the literatures of South Africa’s liberation historiography, Black Consciousness, Black Internationalism/Black Power and new histories of the Cold War. As it pertains to the latter, there has been a new emphasis on moving away from narratives of the Cold War where the superpowers, Cuba, China, Germany and Vietnam hold pride of place. Attempts have been made to engage with how peoples and movements, especially in Africa, creatively navigated the realities of the Cold War to find ways to fund, arm, train and execute their respective guerrilla insurgencies.Footnote ⁸⁷ Within this new rethinking of the Cold War and the wider dynamics of the Third World and decolonisation, my research has uncovered that the Middle East and radical organisations in Western Europe and Eritrea provided sterling, if largely unheralded, contributions to BCM’s armed struggle.

Sources and Methods

The archival and oral interview work used to construct this book was done from 2016 to 2019 across South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Tanzania and the United States. In South Africa, where most of my work took place, I conducted over fifteen interviews with former members of the BCM who either formed their own armed wings or eventually joined MK in the 1970s and 1980s. Additionally, most of the interviews used throughout this manuscript were conducted and compiled by other scholars and made available in the various archives I visited. Original interviews were conducted with three former top-ranking Tanzanian officials in Dar es Salaam to gain an appreciation for how the Tanzanian state viewed the different political trends among the liberation movements.

Archival research was done at the National Heritage and Cultural Studies Centre (NAHECS) at the University of Fort Hare, the Wits Historical Papers – Karis/Gerhart Collection at the University of the Witwatersrand, the Steve Biko Centre in eQonce, the Manuscripts and Historical Papers at the University of Cape Town, the Richard Gibson Papers located in the Gelman Library at George Washington University and the Department of Botswana National Archives & Records Service.

Liberation archives and paperwork as numerous scholars have noted are difficult to find, more so when the movements being researched did not win state power. As it pertains to the BCM cadres, they did not leave much of a paper trail so their written archive is limited. The challenge of this book was balancing the memory of interviewees with primary source materials available in the archives. While in key places, particularly the IRE and AZANLA sections of this book, oral narratives are central, Stephen Davis’s warning about oral histories themselves not being complete narratives is considered.Footnote ⁸⁸ In most circumstances, PAC/ANC and other movement notes, interviews, briefs and documents were used as much as possible to confirm the narratives of the BCM cadres in exile although these primary sources overall did not have an insider perspective on things.

For Chapter 3, efforts were made to balance both oral testimony and archival research in order to construct as accurate a picture of events as possible. Each piece of evidence radiates from specific concerns, biases, stresses and pressures of those who constructed them and so generally neither was used unless multiple sources matched what they were saying. Predominantly with testimonies given under interrogation, a careful process was used to determine which documents were more reliable than others. During interrogations, several dynamics were at play. On the one hand, those being tortured did not want to reveal all that they knew, or did not know, about attempts to organise an armed wing. At the same time, some did succumb to the torture. For those who did, it becomes difficult to tell whether they admitted to certain things because they were violently coerced to, as they claimed, or because this was the truth as they perceived it.

This book also utilises, although sparingly, recently declassified Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents. These documents are used primarily to reveal how the CIA and the US State Department viewed the evolution of southern Africa’s liberation struggles. They show the real fears the United States had of race wars breaking out across the Portuguese colonies and white settler colonial regimes that would harm its economic interests and political objectives, as well as white lives. While communism and its spread were understood as the known enemy to be combated, a closer reading of these documents suggests they were far more worried about the physical and material harm that would come to whites in Africa by Black Nationalist oriented groups.Footnote ⁸⁹ By the 1980s, the American intelligence services were paying more attention to the ANC and Black Consciousness and offered assessments that supports some of the conclusions this book has made in terms of the nature of political struggles around Black Consciousness within the ANC. Yet, care is used when looking at these documents as they often were misinformed on some details of the various African organisations or rely too much on allied intelligence reports. Nevertheless, they provide a unique view on the liberation struggle that much of the literature has not consistently tapped into.

Due to these complexities and confusions, oral interviews and other archival sources were used to match what was said in the various statements to establish its veracity. In other sections of this book, especially those relying more on the memory of various participants, if archival evidence could not be found, especially in establishing dates of certain events or decisions, multiple oral interviews were read together and compared to try to approximate the precise chronology of events.

As it pertains to the gender question, or as others would have it the woman question, a note on methods is required. As mentioned above, the armed component of liberation work in isolation was not and is not the highest form of revolutionary activity and should not be constructed as such. Doing so re-inscribes a binary of ‘real/not real work’ that isn’t always recognised as gendered and risks concealing sexism in plain sight. Some women and men could and did decide not to join armed wings and this must not be seen as a lesser radicalism. Armed struggle would have been impossible without other equally revolutionary forms of activist labour. Given this, while Arming Black Consciousness is about armed struggle against white settler colonialism, it proposes that guerrilla warfare entails far more than just picking up a gun, training and then shooting. To understand an armed revolutionary movement in merely those terms is not to understand it at all.

Towards this end wherever possible but specifically in Chapters 2 and 3, the various labours that went into building and launching an armed revolutionary BCM are detailed. Moreover, it tries to balance weaving the narratives/activity of Black women, like Nosipho Matshoba and Thandika Zondo mentioned above, into the BCM historiography while simultaneously focusing on the intellectual and physical labour of Black women as a separate category in most of the chapters. As it pertains to intellectual work this is important to do, as Shiera el-Malik argues, because it is usually the writings and/or speeches of formal leaders who are men and/or formerly trained scholars who get the most attention.Footnote ⁹⁰ Highlighting other “work-of-the-mind” labour of Black women recognises them as anti-colonialist theorists and activists. A closer examination and valuation of personal narratives as well as centring some of the lesser-known speeches and written works of Black women reveals that despite the multiple jeopardies they faced, ‘women were not simply acted upon, they were at the forefront of dictating the agenda and making sure that the agenda worked across boundaries created and/or exacerbated by indirect rule’.Footnote ⁹¹

Given the limitations of my sources during different time periods under review this process as mentioned above is uneven. More research and more care and creative methods, to paraphrase Saidiya Hartman, is required by myself and others to reconstruct these narratives more fully.Footnote ⁹² At the same time, as the former Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver has continuously stated, it is essential to begin this process by understanding what Black women did during the struggle. Writing the history in this way takes us away from constructing women as solely victims of sexism and towards understanding them as survivors of sexism and autonomous agents fighting for freedom.Footnote ⁹³

In the chapters on BCM itself, I was able to conduct more oral interviews and utilise many that already are available, including memoirs and autobiographies, of women who were in these struggles to amplify their relative neglect in the written archive. For other chapters, particularly the later chapters on BCM and the ANC/MK, I was unable to conduct enough interviews with women who joined MK. Given this, I had to rely on older written sources, interviews conducted by other researchers and some of the writings of Black women in MK that has been preserved and that I was able to access. Overall, while Black Nationalism on both sides of the Atlantic has had a contentious relationship with Black women and Black Feminism, women who joined armed wings of BCM were inseparable from the political and intellectual shaping of the movement.Footnote ⁹⁴

Mapping the Book

Chapter 1 takes a regional and global view of the Long 1960s to explore what was happening across the Pan-African world as it pertained to discussions and mobilisations around African decolonisation. Through this, it offers a bird’s eye view on the nature of the Black Radical Tradition among the activity/activism of the African masses who organically returned to armed struggle in the face of white supremacist denials to their calls for the end of colonialism. At the same time, it tracks more focused debates around tactics and strategy. It does this through an exploration of Kwame Nkrumah’s non-violent positive action and Frantz Fanon’s counter that some Africans would need to return to arms. Across the Atlantic, the growing Black Power movement was engaged in similar debates and sought ways to create closer ties with the growing revolutionary current on the continent. Stokely Carmichael would travel to Tanzania in the late 1960s to submerge himself in these waters and the chapter closes with a discussion of how his presence in Tanzania and the assassination of Dr Martin L. King Jr revealed powerful Black Nationalist thinking among Africans.

Chapter 2 narrows our focus to South Africa/Azania and its manifestation of what Tafira would call the Azanian Black Nationalist Tradition through an examination of the rise of BCM. Adding to and moving beyond histories of the movement which focus on Steve Biko and SASO, this chapter looks at organisations and activists that were essential to the growth of the new political movement outside the academy which have not received as much scholarly attention. Activists such as Bokwe Mafuna, Welile Nhlapo and Nosipho Matshoba are emphasised as we examine what lead them to form BCM’s first armed wing in exile. During these early years, this chapter shows how pervasive, although discreet, discussion about the necessity for the turn to a different form of struggle was to the early Black Consciousness activists.

Chapters 3 and 4 follow four armed wings which were formed by Black Consciousness activists during the 1970s and 1980s. The first was commonly known to South African exiles in Botswana as the “Bokwe Group”, inspired by its leading personality Bokwe Mafuna. Its official name was the APLF, and they had cadres who trained undercover in Botswana, Libya and Syria before trying to infiltrate South Africa. They formed alliances with Palestinian groups who helped train them for armed struggle and in so doing helped expand their understanding of Third World internationalism through the perspective of Black Consciousness. However, shortly after the Soweto Uprising of 1976, due to a host of reasons, this formation disintegrated. In its wake two new organisations arose to replace it, namely, the Isandlwana Revolutionary Effort (IRE) and SAYRCO. Chapter 4 begins by charting the rise and fall of the former in the early 1980s and then moves to an examination of AZANLA.

Chapters 5 and 6 trace the presence of Black Consciousness through what I argue was its radicalisation of the ANC/MK in the 1970s and 1980s. Chapter 5 chronicles how Black Consciousness activists like Keith Mokoape re-energised and re-focused the ANC/MK in the early 1970s after they left South Africa for exile in Botswana and later Zambia. Its prime focus is on the decade post-Soweto which is seen by most scholars of Umkhonto we Sizwe as being a key turning point in South Africa’s armed struggle. While the Soweto generation of MK recruits is praised as being key to this shift, they are commended more for providing numbers to the ANC/MK instead of tangibly shaping and reshaping the movement in exile.Footnote ⁹⁵ This chapter argues Black Consciousness activists were central to the resurgence of MK and did not enter the organisation as blank slates, as many at the time claimed and far too many now perpetuate.

Chapter 6 details the repression many Black Consciousness cadres underwent in the MK camps in Angola. Despite joining the ANC/MK with the desire to return home to free their country from white settler colonialism, thousands of cadres would remain trapped in Angolan camps until the 1990s. There have been a few explanations offered as to why this happened. Some have argued it was done to save the lives of these fiery young guerrillas as death rates among those infiltrated was high. Others have suggested the ANC was never serious about the armed overthrow of the state, consequently, having thousands of guerrillas in the camps was more of a political/diplomatic tool to show the world it was a legitimate leader of the liberation movement. This chapter adds to these explanations by suggesting part of the reason so many cadres were left in the camps and were repressed in places like Quatro was because of their Black Consciousness politics which clashed with the growing non-racialism of the ANC/Congress tradition.

Conclusion summarises the main arguments, discusses ways this perspective can be used to rethink African Liberation Movement history and ends by trying to assess this history of Black Consciousness through a brief reading of current political events in Azania. The conclusion argues understanding BCM and its various tendencies and projects will be critical to grasping the political potential of the new leaders and organisations emerging in South Africa and across Africa going forward. Still, there are holes in this narrative which I hope future research will attempt to fill. The book has sought to offer an accurate narrative on the development of BCM’s armed struggle from the perspectives of those who now held the ball of liberation in their hands.