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The End of the Black Man

Article  in  Agenda · January 1998

DOI: 10.1080/10130950.1998.9675692

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 International Journal of Intercultural Relations
27 (2003) 237–249

We black men
Kopano Ratele*
Department of Psychology, University of the Western Cape, Private Bag X17, Bellville 7535, South Africa
Received 4 May 2001; received in revised form 7 January 2002; accepted 16 March 2002

Abstract

This paper looks at the construction of masculinity in black consciousness politics via a
reading of Steve Biko’s article, We Blacks. Biko, known as ‘the father of black consciousness’
in South Africa, wrote We Blacks for the South African Students Organization’s (SASO)
Newsletter as part of a series he called ‘I write what I like’. At the time, Biko served as
chairman of SASO publications, and the Organization was involved in mobilizing and
recruiting black tertiary students, following a walkout from the white-led NUSAS (National
Union of South African Students). While I tend to agree that there remains a need to keep
working at the difficulties faced by black men, I argue here that such troubles should not be
conflated with those confronting black people in general, and black women more specifically—
among which are those arising from the very notion of masculinity in black national politics.
Central to the paper is an aim, an argument, and a question. The question is, what is the basis
for solidarity among black South Africans seeing that we are now officially free? The argument
is that it is ever more urgent to look at black men as men with differing personal histories,
personalities, desires, and class positions in theorizing and re-constructing South African
society. The aim is to show the problems of using the black male as a figure for the troubles
faced by all black people.
r 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Blacks; Masculinity; Politics; Race; South Africa; Steve Biko

1. Introduction

There is to be found within the archives of struggle in South Africa a small body of
critical social theory in general and critical social psychology in particular (see e.g.,

*Corresponding author. Tel.: +27-21-959-2841; fax: +27-21-9593515.

E-mail address: kratele@uwc.ac.za (K. Ratele).

0147-1767/03/$ - see front matter r 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/S0147-1767(02)00094-9
238 K. Ratele / International Journal of Intercultural Relations 27 (2003) 237–249

Anonymous, 1986; Nicholas, 1993; Seedat, 1998; Stevens & Lockhat, 1997) that
might be termed recapturing (after Paulin Hountondji, Hountondji, 1992), or
recovery, renewal, and regeneration (used at different times by Thabo Mbeki). There
is a sense in such work that something like a recapturing or regeneration is possibly a
productive path to pursue where people are desirous to turn around the on-going
cultural, including intellectual dependency of the oppressed. That work indicates
recovery of local knowledges, and thus identities, as crucial to any desire to shift the
centers of the global social, political, and economic worlds we participate in (Duncan
et al., 1997; Whittaker, 1991).
Now often when we come across projects for renewal, of recovering life as we
knew it, or as we would have it, we are likely to find with it another. This is the
project for a united front, for unity at all costs. This usually implies a preclusion of
some kinds of critique. But one must note that in the face of on-going xenophobia,
increasing racism, racial and cultural ‘incidents’ the world over, this desire for unity
among those on the sharp end of these practices is understandable, perhaps even
necessary. It is against such a background that I shall begin by conceding the fact
that black males, as part of groups subjected to racism and other iniquities, have
serious, persisting problems that enjoin us to keep working at unity to challenge
these practices. But, the question that needs asking now is, what is the relationship of
racial unity and transformative black politics on one side, and calls to attend to
black men’s problems and construct a new masculinity on the other? Another way of
putting it is to say, who are black men when they are not victims of oppression?
Nestled in that main question, on the relationship between the unity of the race and
the rejuvenation of the man of the race, is another important question: How is Biko
to be read in, and what does the BC gesture signal for, post-apartheid South Africa,
regarding a black man in his relations to himself, his relations to other black men
and black women (what is sometimes called the same others), and his relations with
others, for example white men and white women (sometimes referred to as other
others)?
My object with this paper is to respond to the question, or two questions, by
reading emphatically but critically a piece of writing by Steve Biko entitled, We
Blacks. Biko is considered to be ‘the father’ of black consciousness (BC) thought in
South Africa, and since his death, the guiding spirit of the political organs that
subscribed to that political philosophy. It is more or less common knowledge that
the activist was tortured by the apartheid state security, and in September of 1977,
before his 31st birthday, died in police custody. I see the article We Blacks as arising
out of a discursive world that the BC leader calls up in his re-construction of the
black man. It is part of that call for unity and recovery referred to above. I argue that
the ‘things’ that Biko writes of and is trying to recover—the black man that he is
talking about and mobilizing, both the man and Biko’s own blackness and
masculinity, and the racial and cultural worlds of blacks and whites—are far from
complete. The blackness of blacks is not a ‘thing’ one can simply go ahead and
recover. So is the ‘thingness’ of masculinity, of race, and of culture. These ‘things’ are
in fact in the very process of being built in Biko’s work, are always in the process of
being erected in every theory and practice, being constructed, shored up, and
 K. Ratele / International Journal of Intercultural Relations 27 (2003) 237–249 239

rehearsed. At the same time though, they are being defended, protected, tested, and
challenged.

2. Assumptions

I must ask to take you through some of my assumptions and impressions of Biko.
By this I hope to put my critical analysis in perspective. It was that when a black
person, and perhaps more so, a black young male picks up a copy Biko’s writing, the
person is likely to have heard the name of the BC man. It was also that the imagined
reader is in some way primed to the social and political situation of the black person.
The writer and the reader (are thought to) assume a certain level of what Manganyi
(1973) called a mutuality of understanding. But if the writer and the imagined reader
do not yet share a way of seeing, there is at least an a priori assumption that we, the
black writer and the black reader, share a certain social, cultural, political, and
perhaps even racial condition, all of which come down to their embodiedness. Thus
Biko is writing for someone who looks like himself. It could also be argued that Biko
is writing for someone who should be like him, but perhaps also someone Biko
would like to be. I think these are possibly what emboldens Biko enough to assert
that the black (man) is weak, needs to be conscientized, and through this, he, Biko,
as part black consciousness project, will make the black (man) ready to go to war for
freedom. This is the figure for whom Biko sits down and writes out a politics, a
history, a culture, and a being, the black (male) student in the 1970s—in a way, as we
said, the writer himself as he desires to be.
One of the things implied here is that, for example, as a white female or male, in
the middle of reading Biko in 2002, you come to think, ‘there is a problem with his
analysis’, you may be correct. This is not simply about the alienation of race though.
It is possible that a black female or male in a previously racially exclusive suburb
might also think, ‘no, Biko had it wrong in this line here’. Dialogue, contrary to
popular opinion, is a fraught business, and much more so is dialogue over historical
and social distances. We should be cautious then as to how we interpret Biko thirty
years later, whether as whites here and elsewhere, or as blacks in post-apartheid
South Africa or in the United States. It is crucial to keep in mind that, in this article
especially, as the title indicates, Biko is speaking to black students and youth as one
of their own. He is a black young man writing for and to young black people about
blackness in the seventies. This is the imaginative position from which we must read
him, and the proper one from which we should build our critique.

3. Biko’s Blacks

We Blacks was published in the September 1971 issue of SASO Newsletter. It is

one the activist wrote under the signature, Frank Talk, as part of the series, ‘I write
what I like’. At the time of putting together the series, Biko served as chairman of
SASO publications. It is important to note that two years previous to writing the
240 K. Ratele / International Journal of Intercultural Relations 27 (2003) 237–249

articles, Biko together with his comrades had broken away from the National Union
of South African Students (NUSAS), and in July of 1969 he became the first
president of the new organization. SASO was deeply involved in the work of
mobilizing black tertiary students and recruiting new members. As publicity
secretary, Biko was one of those articulating the philosophical grounds underlying
the political organ.
Since I am going to talk not just about what Biko said and how, but also what he
did not say, someone who may not want us to find fault with such a leading black
figure can argue that some of the gaps that are found in the argument in We Blacks
are plugged elsewhere. To an extent, this might be true. In the previous edition of the
Newsletter for instance, Biko had written on the idea of integration and the position
of white liberals under the title of Black souls in white skins? In a later issue he would
write about the fragmentation of the black freedom movement. But that argument is
insupportable insofar as nowhere in the series does he take up the issues raised here.
Be that as it may, in the article we are looking at he devotes his attention to what the
inchoate philosophy of black consciousness has to say to the world of the oppressed,
as he avers, not as a detached observer but as a black man.
The article is short, bold, impassioned, and characterized by a declamatory tone.
The length, tone and style themselves hold one key to understanding We Blacks, and
it is possible to use this key to understand Steve Biko’s world. The form of the piece
tells us something about how Biko’s mind might have been working. His thinking,
that is to say, can be productively searched for in the article itself, and the other ones
Biko wrote, rather than ‘something inside him’.
The article opens with the now commonplace assertion that for a person born
during the reign of the Afrikaner National Party government, the policy of separate
development came to affect almost everything in his or her life. To a very large
degree apartheid was out to use its law to determine people’s, especially black
people’s behaviors, identities, relationships, and thoughts. Evidence abounds that a
large part if not the whole of the establishment was geared at determining where one
could and could not live, the possible friendships one could entertain, the loves had
and missed, whom one could not or could marry, the extent and quality of the
education got, even the possible ideas, motivation, will, aspirations, indeed one’s
total self. It is important to keep in mind that at the end of these opening remarks
Biko reveals that he managed to disentangle himself from some of the determina-
tions of the government.
Next he tackles ‘the problem’ in South Africa. He dismisses other organizations
fighting against apartheid, on the one hand, as having mis-diagnosed the problem
and, on another, as working from an oversimplified understanding. According to
Biko, the ideology of racial separation on its own was evil, whichever way you
looked at it. Because of its importance, and apparent contradiction, within the
context of the ideas of black consciousness specifically, and race politics in general,
let me repeat that: The separation of races in practice, and in thinking about the
world, is in itself retrogressive if not downright degenerate: That is what the activist
wrote. Biko goes on to argue that when coupled with supremacist ideas, capitalist
exploitation, and deliberate oppression it complexifies the problem in South Africa.
 K. Ratele / International Journal of Intercultural Relations 27 (2003) 237–249 241

Nonetheless, he states, this is not the worst of it. It is the poverty of souls generated
by or spinning off from apartheid that is most devastating because it is what
dehumanizes. Psychic poverty is what turns the black person into ‘a shell, a shadow,
a sheep, an ox, an animal, a slave’ (Biko, 1996, p. 29). The death of the psyche leaves
the form of a human, that is, a black man only in form, a body without a spirit.
The latter half of the paper is taken up with a discussion that weaves together and
through the interlocking ideas of culture, history, and religion. The activist shows the
uses of these discursive practices for those engaged on both sides of the power divide.
In respect to history, he says the African child learns self-hate from school because of
the negative image of African society in historiography. Biko (1996) proposes that:

(P)art of the approach envisaged in bringing about ‘black consciousness’ has to be

directed to the past, to seek to rewrite the history of the black man and to produce
in it the heroes who form the core of the African background. To the extent that a
vast literature about Gandhi in South Africa is accumulating it can be said that
the Indian community already has started in this direction. But only scant
reference is made to African heroes (p. 29).

He ends by delivering a truism of anti-colonial and national revolutions and

cultural and ethnic struggles: ‘A people without a positive history is like a vehicle
without an engine’ (p. 29). He is arguing that this negative history is part of the cause
black movements are unable to control the emotions of the people. Such a people,
according to Biko, without heroes and thus with unchanneled emotional life, cannot
be roused to revolution against their oppressor because they live in the shadow of the
oppressor, even celebrating their own defeat.
Regarding culture, the author refers to the ease with which Africans communicate
with each other as a trait that is deeply ingrained in their character. It is important to
note that later on, however, he will warn that we should be careful not to lose this
and other indigenous cultural virtues, such as the oneness of community that lies at
the heart of African culture. He adduces Indians who confound white hospital
officials by bringing gifts for strangers as a ‘manifestation of the interrelationship
between man and man in the black world as opposed to the highly impersonal world’
(Biko, 1996, p. 30) in which white people live.
About religion, Biko argues that Christianity is a white man’s religion. He says it
was erected on rotten foundations. The reason young black women and men leave
the church is precisely this: There is no message for black people in Christianity.
Those who believe in it, he contends, are gullible because they already have no
spiritual content. A Christian God who allows people to suffer under an immoral
system is an anachronism. The only religious message fit for the oppressed is that
contained in black theology which is an attempt to redefine and adapt the message in
the bible and make it relevant to the revolution. Even while basing itself on Christ’s
precepts, black theology takes cultural context seriously. It is an attempt to show
that the bible resonates with the black people in their ‘long journey towards
realization of the self’ (Biko, 1996, p. 31). Thus black theology sees Jesus, who
accepts ancestor worship, as being on the side of the struggle for freedom.
242 K. Ratele / International Journal of Intercultural Relations 27 (2003) 237–249

What we have left out until now is the motif that runs through Biko’s writing, that
of black consciousness, and what such a position is said to hold for black people
about their situation. Not just once, but at several points in the piece, Biko defines,
outlines, intimates, tells us what the political philosophy of black consciousness
means to him and SASO, what it is all about, and what it seeks to do for the
oppressed. He characterizes it as an inward looking process, whose intention is ‘to
make the black man come to himself’ (p. 29). The process happens when a life of
pride and dignity is pumped back into the shell black males have become. According
to Biko, black consciousness is a philosophy of everyday life that reminds black men
of their complicity with racism. The aim of this philosophy is to show the value of
their own standards and worldview to black people themselves. On behalf of black
consciousness Biko urges black people to use these standards, and not those of white
society, to judge themselves. Black people are given a positive view of their situation.
He states that although hating white people may be comprehensible this is not what
black consciousness is about. Black consciousness sees hate as heedless, short-term,
and unproductive for both black and white alike. What is sought, he says, is a
meaningful and directed channel for the pent-up anger of the forces in the oppressed.
Black consciousness desires to make people of one mind, and involve them, the
masses, in a struggle that they must come to feel is theirs. Black consciousness,
according to Biko, makes sense because it speaks the language of the black man in
every sphere of life.

4. Ambivalence

Having given an overview of the ideas contained in the paper, let me now try to
situate them, their author, and his organization against the backcloth of
contemporary South African life, that is to say, before I enter into dialogue proper
with the ideas which generate ambivalence when reading Biko, matters which he
overlooked, sidestepped, conserved, treated lightly. Of course there have been many
who over the years have put their minds to this or that other part of Biko and his
comrades’ ideas, but there are aspects of their social and political thinking and
practice that have received no attention at all.
We have noted that besides being considered to be the father of black
consciousness politics in South Africa, Biko became one of the icons of revolutions
in the country and elsewhere. Not only is he commemorated, being closely related to
the 16 June 1976 student uprising, and his words widely quoted, he has been
immortalized in popular history and culture around the world, in films such as Cry
Freedom (regardless of what many might think about the emphasis in this one in
particular), in sculpture, in painting, and music of diverse genres, such as that of
Peter Gabriel and Wyclef Jean. Recently, a number of young black men have, with
financial help from the Ford Foundation, established a Steve Biko Foundation in the
Gauteng Province, which stages memorial lecture series and carries out other
projects under his name. The Institute for the Advancement of Journalism offers
Steve Biko Scholarships for African journalists. Although there has always been an
 K. Ratele / International Journal of Intercultural Relations 27 (2003) 237–249 243

interest in Biko since his torture and murder, these current moves signal a veritable
swell of attention in his life and work, and indeed, must be taken to mean the
institutionalization of the man’s political thought and black consciousness in
general. On their own, these events, memory works, moves, and surfacings,
therefore, urge looking even more closely at Biko’s texts for his times and ours. In
addition, these events (including this essay) around Biko become especially
significant if the interest is seen as part of a larger inspiration associable with the
idea of African Renaissance, the movement being led by Thabo Mbeki and other
African political leaders.
There are many of us who learned a lot from Biko’s writings, and those of others
too numerous to mention, about the nature of our economic, social and political
condition in South Africa. If I have gotten to a point where I do not agree with his
thinking on numerous points, I appreciate the spirit of the day, the man’s lead, and
the urgencies generated by apartheid and in the daily struggle against it. That is my
enduring gut response to his work. However, I find myself in a quandary when I
reflect at some length on his words. My dilemma is in regard to what it implies when
one applies such political understandings to the present condition. The problem is
not one of being entirely retrograde. Indeed, were Biko a reactionary he would pose
very little ambivalence to me, his work would be less of a problem to deal with, and
the black consciousness would be very easy to ignore. The problem arises from the
fact that he was a radical activist. According to his contemporaries he was a
committed, strong, and popular activist. It is said the man was a charismatic yet also
a hands-on leader of the people who knew the conditions of his constituency. From
his writing, we sense an absolutely passionate person.

5. An untimely man

Critical identity politics attempts to see how varied positionings or identifying

gestures influence what people say about the world, themselves, and others. As one
of those who practice but are disenchanted with much of psychology as we have it in
South Africa, some of the questions I ask of myself and of others’ work come down
to this: what does this (personality, behavior, disorder, intelligence, attachments and
other topics on which psychologists claim expertise) have to do with economic,
cultural, and political positionings? At the same time, my professional location urges
me to ask about the stories individuals tell about or do not tell about themselves,
about how they make sense of their actions, lives, and relationships. The relationship
between what we say, write, or produce on the one hand, and our position in society,
on the other, is of course not deterministic. One does not have to be a rural white
woman to have a problem with this man; just as one does not have to be a black,
upper middle class South African to say something like, ‘‘I can’t really say for black
consciousness’’; just as much as one cannot really claim that, ‘‘as a black man I can
tell you what black men think’’.
On first mentioning the words black man Biko could be taken to refer to himself,
not other black men or black people. The second time he utters the phrase though,
244 K. Ratele / International Journal of Intercultural Relations 27 (2003) 237–249

we sense that perhaps the first reading was too gentle, sort of incomplete, maybe
even incorrect: ‘‘What’’, is how the sentence goes, ‘‘makes the black man fail to
tick?’’ (Biko, 1996, p. 28). That the question follows from a reference to ‘black
people’ alerts us to the slippage. In the paragraph where he asks and answers the
question, he will mention the phrase ‘black man’ three times in all, the term ‘man’
twice, in addition to the masculine form used here and throughout the article.
While he claims blackness as a politics, not only a ‘personal’ identity but a social
position, Biko is addressing himself not to blacks but black males first and foremost.
He is addressing black males in fact. Even with that move only, he puts them at the
front of the democratic revolution. Blackness will become positive, and black people
will be able to face up to their oppressor, when black(s) (males) have learned to act
like men, able to rise, face up to, and revolt against white racism, by which he means,
if you will, the white male set up. This is easy to see though, and has been written on
by Biko’s comrades. Writing in an introduction to an edition of Biko’s work,
Mpumlwana and Mpumlwana (1996), for example, have said that although they
shared a passion for black freedom with him, they have come to recognize the gender
bias of Biko’s work:

The struggle to reorder the attitudes and relationships of women themselves,

between women and men, and the socio-cultural and economic milieu of our
existence is as fundamental as the struggle ever was for the re-ordering of race
relations for blacks in South Africa and the world (p. xiii).

Mpumlwana and Mpumlwana (1996) also state that they have since realized that
the experience of being excluded and regarded as non-persons because of gender is as
painful as being excluded and regarded as nothing because of one’s skin color. It
must be said though, that these comrades of Biko have also trod with caution in their
efforts to answer for him. They explain away Biko’s practices, rather than making us
understand them. For instance, in spite of their views stated above, they have argued
that the masculinization of blackness and gender bias in Biko’s work must be seen in
the context of his historical period (Mpumlwana & Mpumlwana, 1996). What this
sounds like is an attempt to protect or excuse Biko. The historical conditions that
these authors have deployed as the reason for Biko’s ungendered, seemingly asexual
politics are themselves important to try to decipher. Behind their one-line
explanation lurks a deterministic and unidirectional notion of individual/social
relations. To say that Biko was a product of his time does not shield, contextualize,
nor help in making him more relevant to our times. The relations of men and women
to their discursive materials, that is, their cultural, political, and economic climate is
complex. To claim that somebody is of his or her time is therefore of little use when
one wants to understand the times that produced the person and shaped their life
and work. More importantly though, the attempt to use his time, the seventies, to
cover Biko’s back from a thoroughgoing analysis on this particular point does his
work harm rather than good. I believe such efforts calcify the passion that was
present during a life, making it inflexible, brittle, out of date. More than merely
rendering black struggle male and ungendered, a problem that characterizes many
 K. Ratele / International Journal of Intercultural Relations 27 (2003) 237–249 245

national revolutions up to-date, Biko becomes parochial, irrelevant, dead as far as

contemporary conditions are concerned.
Biko shows himself in many ways not to be of his time. We have noted that, at the
end of his opening remarks, Biko declares that he was able to be something other
than what the government intended him and other black people to be. He stood up
against the racial order that was put in place. This challenging attitude was not only
directed at the establishment, and cannot but have been part of the same
understanding, positioning or, if you will, energy that enabled him to challenge
other things. That attitude informed Biko’s lead in the walkout on NUSAS, which
was recognized as the representative union of students in the country. One can read
the same in his Letter to SRC presidents, where he rejected the black media of the
time. And, where he speaks about the black political leaders, which included the
leaders of the African National Congress, the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania,
and the South African Communist Party, people like Oliver Reginald Tambo,
Nelson Rolihhlahla Mandela, and Robert Smangaliso Sobukwe, in a tone which is
sneering, brusque, showing very little respect for them, and not even caring to call
them by their names (Biko, 1996, p. 27). If anything, this is not a very good product
of his time.

6. The nature of blackness

The nature of Biko’s blackness can be seen in the skid marks gestured to earlier,
when he moves from males to blacks, from black men to human beings. But if one
has missed them, the marks are ineluctable in this line: ‘‘Black people under the
Smuts government were oppressed but they were still men’’ (Biko, 1996, p. 28).
Elsewhere I have argued against the silence around this masculinist politics—which
others have claimed was necessary (Ratele, 1998). The argument that the sex/gender
of the rhetorical political subject of the black consciousness project was determined
by the nature of apartheid, as is the one that males are naturally more politically
conscious than females, is duplicitous. The irony of course is that patriarchal and
sexist assumptions underpinned both the laws of apartheid and the struggles against
those laws. But it must be indicated that such assumptions and arguments are not
limited to black consciousness thought and Biko’s project. Numerous gender-
conscious writers have articulated the same: That within the national project in
South Africa, any analysis of the oppression or exclusion of black women tended to
be in respect to their race, and not their sexuality or gender or class (e.g. Walker,
1991). One can also recognize similar sorts of insularity within nationalist
revolutions and cultural movements in other parts in the world.
What seems to trouble Steve Biko most in this paper is a loss of black manhood.
The intimation in the statement about when our uncles and fathers were men, during
Jan Smuts’ time, is that the recovery of black masculinity, of a type of maleness, in
contradistinction, for instance, to the recovery of the psychic and embodied integrity
of all oppressed humans, or a strong black womanhood, or some kind of femininity,
is what will lead to the freedom of the race. To put it in another way, a crucial
246 K. Ratele / International Journal of Intercultural Relations 27 (2003) 237–249

requirement for racial emancipation is the restoration of the soul and self-esteem of
black males. Here lies the essence of the inward looking process of black
consciousness—to look inside the mind or person of the black male.
The surprising thing in the assumptions contained in We Blacks, is that they reveal
as much as they conceal about the identities of males and their practice. I shall not
repeat the comments I have made about the effacement of ambiguities of masculinity
and race in Biko’s project, which, as I indicated, one can read right from the start in
the use of the exhortative and repeated singular, black man. But while he provokes
the black man to come to himself, we are not quite sure, except in relation to a lack
of freedom, where the black male got lost, or where he should go. When he sets out
to inspire black men to rescue themselves, do we really know what it is they must
rescue (about themselves), except for the pride eroded by a racist political and social
structure? The irony of this loss and recovery mission is that one will find some
would agree that Biko’s man (if not the activist himself), may need rescuing still,
trying to find his path, a-ways from wherever he was supposed to be, even though the
fall of the formal system of racist apartheid happened nearly seven years ago.
If Biko knew his man, what readers are left with are hints at, rather than a spelling
out of, the type of man he has in mind, who will fight for freedom and come to
fruition when liberation is won. What stays in mind is something that reads like a
magical process: slave þ black consciousness Fpolitical struggle political freedom ¼
real black man. This is unrealistic. When one % is concerned with the politics of
everyday society, life, as people say, is complicated; there cannot but be many issues
that pass through one’s mind which remain unanswered by this formulaic process.
For instance, some of the quotidian questions that one might ask when looking at
who Biko’s real men are: Could he be androgynous in appearance, or does he have to
be all muscular and strong? Can he be a good ballet dancer and homosexual at the
same time, or are only potential and actual straight by-the-book family men allowed?
Does he read the Koran yet indulges in a little masochism? Is it absolutely important
that he be monogamous, and ought it matter to him if others like watching
pornography? What does he think of Thandie Newton and Alek Wek—are they both
beautiful Africans, or does he think black African women should be a little fuller of
shape? What is his view on lesbian marriages? Where does he live? Can he be rich in
the new South Africa? Should he like any of Sandiwe Magona writing? All right, let’s
say he is a big thirty-something heterosexual male who likes soccer and lives in
Alexander, Gauteng Province, is it alright if he prefers The picture of Dorian Gray
and The stranger over Things fall apart and the poetry of Mazizi Kunene; Gunter
Gras, Sylvia Plath, and J.M. Coetzee over Zakes Mda, Noni Jabavu, Soyinka, and
Ama Ata Aidoo; opera rather than jazz and kwaito; penne arrabiata instead of
samp, spinach, and tripe? And, while we are on food, what is his favourite dessert,
his favourite restaurant, and so forth?
We will never know Biko’s answers to many of these questions because he didn’t
write about them. But does that mean he thought them unimportant, or did he take
it for granted that we all knew and agreed on what is a black person, a man, a
woman? I do not believe that he thought them unimportant at all. We have noted
that when he begins the article, he refers to the fact that apartheid segregation
 K. Ratele / International Journal of Intercultural Relations 27 (2003) 237–249 247

touched every aspect of black people’s lives, from their intimate personal
relationships, thoughts, and feelings, to their education, careers, and social mobility.
In a few months after Biko wrote the article, he would get married. Like many
political leaders, he does not get to mention this little fact in this self-reflexive titled
piece. But Biko might not have anticipated his marriage. Still one could ask: ‘‘Is
there perhaps a chance that he believed that these matters are private and have
nothing to do with his politics?’’ Even if one concedes that the activist may not have
known that he was going to get married in a space of a few months, this is obviously
a contradiction since the fact that he saw apartheid as affecting all manner of things
in black people’s lives, including people’s intimacies, shows nothing if not the
imbrication of the private and public spheres. In addition, we must note that Biko
(1996), when he feels like it, does confront the mundane and the private, such as
workers riding home in a bus or a man in a toilet:
In the privacy of his toilet his face twists in silent condemnation of white society
but brightens up in sheepish obedience as he comes out hurrying in response to his
master’s impatient call. In the home-bound bus or train he joins the chorus that
roundly condemns the white man but is first to praise the government in the
presence of the police or his employers (p. 28).
If Biko can get down to lift the everyday experience of a bus or train ride to the
level of the political, or see fit to publicize the anguish of a man in a lavatory, surely
we can put to Biko and the black consciousness program the matters we have—who
are black men when they are not out chanting against the white man—as well as why
he did not give mind to the condition of black women.

7. Gendering black consciousness

Two crucial, intertwined matters seem to lie at the center of We Blacks then: A re-
construction of black masculinity; the deployment of that black((ness) masculinity)
as politics. In that sentence, as I have done at times above, I have played with a third
related concern, which is the first word in the title of Biko’s article, the first word in
our sentence: We. This is in fact where we started, found in our comments about
unity. ‘We’ is always an indication of, and often, a wish for unity, rather than an
accomplished fact. There is a certain pull to claim a commonality when one writes or
speaks—saying we feel this or that, this is our heritage, this is how we do it, it comes
down to us. But often the speaker or writer cannot really know how his or her
auditors feel, how a particular reader stands in relation to such and such an
historical event, let alone what she or he inherits, how she or he would (want to) do
whatever is done, and whether indeed the person wants to be a part of the assumed
group. Rather, words are always intended to do something. They are infused with all
kinds of motives, among them the motive for unity and power. Thus when their
author lays claim to unity, oneness, solidarity, in the best of circumstance he or she
hopes that there is a shared community of interests with those in his or her mind. The
community might seem to arise out of a shared history, a feeling brought about by a
248 K. Ratele / International Journal of Intercultural Relations 27 (2003) 237–249

certain legacy. Perhaps more appropriately though, one speaks or writes to cultivate
a community, a way of looking at society and history. One writes not merely to say
something about oneself, but to produce an ‘us’, African women of a certain bent, a
black man of special type.
In his lecture on Biko, Ndebele (2000) spoke about what he called, our historic
responsibility. I understand this not to mean a slavish, blind belief in what Biko said.
The idea of historic responsibility suggests that in thinking about Biko specifically,
and other black political leaders of the past, we are required not to restrict ourselves
to the letter of what they said, but read their words and actions against the historical
political conditions against which they spoke and acted. It means all radical projects
against oppression and marginalization can only be read against a certain context.
This is not a contradiction of what was said about men and their time: One should
explain texts and practices within their time, but at the same time, offer an
explanation of that time.
Historic responsibility is an argument not to stay in the past. Such a response will
not, for instance, limit our thinking on race or freedom to what Biko said in the
seventies. I want to believe that being concerned with Biko and black consciousness
from a gendered perspective is with that benefit. To both black men and black
women then, and to all who are committed to social justice, history is telling us there
is great, urgent, and new consciousness-raising work around a complex self and
other that holds some of the keys to better gendered racial and cultural relations.
This is what a critical consciousness is.

8. Conclusion

I began by saying that just like other groups which continue to be discriminated
against, there is case to keep working at the various problems faced by black men.
Along the way I showed the troubles with masculine racial politics. At the center of
my critique is the question, ‘‘Who are we?’’ The aim has been to show the
invidiousness of using the black man as a figure for the troubles faced by all black
people, and black women in particular. I managed to gesture to some of the
unfortunate consequences to such figuring—the sort of knee-jerk reaction by some
black women. My argument has been that it is important to look at black men as
males, and not simply blacks, but also beings with different aspirations, needs,
personalities, histories, connections. I argued against glossing over the differences
among black males, among which I suggested differences of class, sexuality, what we
value, education, our desires, tastes, and so on. It goes without saying that if it is
agreed that intra-group differences exist among black males, there will be difference
between black males and black females, but also among black females. The gesture
towards intra-racial and inter-sex dissimilarities is also relevant to the fact that
thwarting disagreement is not only confined to blacks but troubles any group which
historical circumstance such as apartheid, cultural hegemony, or capitalism pushes
together. The question that runs through the article has been, ‘‘what should the
grounds of unity be, seeing we are now officially free?’’; in other words, ‘‘what brings
 K. Ratele / International Journal of Intercultural Relations 27 (2003) 237–249 249

us together—when no longer a slave-race nor slave-men?’’ When the ambiguities,

silences, gloss, which a lot of identity theorists have been talking about have been
taken serious note of, many of the sentiments of black consciousness about self make
very good practical sense. Precisely because there are enduring possibilities for a
more just and free society in a gendered black consciousness; an involved, ever
critical watch on its limitations, omissions, biases, and injustices.

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