Why I think the “Black Consciousness’ of Steve Biko still has a place and a role to play in SA...
When something bad happens, when a woman living in an informal settlement in South Africa gets beaten up by her husband again I hear this said in explanation ‘ Well, you know, us blacks, the black men are like that, they are a problem. I don’t know why’.
Well I have a lot of reasons...poverty and the culture it sets up, Apartheid, migrant labour, patriarchy, fatherless men, violent childhoods...the list goes on for pages and pages and if anyone cares to actually know the reasons and opens their minds enough to allow them in they are all spread out before us... BUT none of the reasons I would cite is the colour of the person. That tiny switch in our genes that give us the colour of our skin...
Or the explanation of children being neglected and exposed to risky situations? Same problems, same culture of poverty whether of the one of physical poverty or emotional poverty, You see rich people also abuse the people they love and they also neglect their children and expose them to risk by their neglect and lack of focus on their children.
I distresses me that so many black people still see their problems in terms of being particular to their colour and that white people also see problems in terms of the colour of a person’s skin...skin colour has nothing to do with your brains, potential and temperament. It is not helpful. It takes from a universal problem and universal solutions. It takes our humanity from us to see ourselves as fundamentally different.
One young woman described her tummy upset to me as if I would never have had one like her as I was white! We have the same reactions to eating bad things or eating badly – we need the same sorts of treatment (though of course we may respond differently but that has nothing to do with our outer colour).
Of course culture shapes us. It makes us feel it’s not Easter if we don’t eat chocolate or it’s not Divali if we don’t light the candles or eat yummy sweetmeats or hunt the matzos at Jewish New Year...it shapes us in ways that are helpful for our present environment but also in ways that aren’t (and generally the unhelpful thing’s start changing – sometimes really quickly.) Not always in the best ways and not always in ways that please us oldies. But humans like the Earth always look for balance so that will come in the end... Also please let’s not use the culture of poverty, Aparthied, Bantu education, violence, patriarchy and other useless cultural practises as our yardstick...
Let’s not remake South Africa as a traumatised, unprocessed society – by recreating the bad we know. (Just as a traumatised abused child may chose an abusive partner in adulthood and recreate what they ‘know’.) Let’s think about ourselves, our beliefs, our cultures and challenge them all, and process that we still find painful – and try to make the unknowable, knowable and the unthinkable, thinkable. Then maybe we can really create a new South Africa that is a healthy one untainted by our terrible past.
I believe that eventually we will see a South Africa with a more unified culture – although I think matzos, Easter eggs, lights and burfi as are here as are our religions. I actually wonder how many actually pure white people we will have in a few hundred years? After visiting St Helena I suspect it won’t be at all that long...
Black consciousness – as in the belief that colour does not determine anything about your worth, mind, body, intelligence, potential and basic human-ness – that still has value. We need to think more about this – all of us...