The Continued Impact of Black Consciousness in South Africa

Abstract

The idea of Black Consciousness heralded an era of alternative political awareness in the late 1960s. A self-empowering, vibrant, reconstructionist world-view emphasised the potential rôle of black initiatives and responsibility in articulating the power of the powerless. Between 1968–76, the Black Consciousness Movement (B.C.M.), as it became known, was one of the most important developments in South Africa, not only as the result of the self-confident protest and rebellion that it unleashed, but also ‘because of the questions it posed about the nature of oppositional politics in South Africa and its relation to the nature of South African society’.1