Abstract
There is no general agreement among contemporary BC adherents on the role of culture and history in black struggles. There are two contending positions. For purposes of expediency, let us call them “modernist” and “roots.” These are not a new aberration in contemporary BC thought, they are an age-old problematic the 1970s BC proponents grappled with and could find neither a common agreement nor a similar theoretical trajectory. Contemporary conversations are not much divorced from those of yore; thus, in this chapter, I am not looking at repeating them at length, rather I want to use more of the textual. One, which is prominent among the petit-bourgeois black radicals, says that black culture is anachronistic, is mired in atavism and that most black cultural practices are inimical to liberation because of their oppressive nature and history is inconsequential, what matters most is the present. This school believes in a “100 % modern black” and that there can only be subscription to a single culture: “a culture of liberation.”
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Notes
- 1.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1973. Being and Nothingness. An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Northampton: John Dickens and Co. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1968 On Genocide. Ramparts 6.
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Work, Monroe. 1916. The Passing Tradition and the African Civilisation. Woodson, Carter G, ed. The Journal of Negro History Volume 1 Number 1.
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1652 is when Jan. van Riebeeck arrived in South Africa, setting a process of colonisation.
- 5.
Biko, Steve Bantu. 1987. I Write What I Like. Aelred Stubbs CR, ed. London: Heinemann.
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Ibid.
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Ibid.
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Fanon, Franz. 1961. The Wretched of the Earth, trans Constance Farrington. London: Penguin Books.
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Ibid.
- 10.
Cabral, Amilcar. 1973. Return to Source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral. Africa Information Service, ed. New York: Monthly Review Press.
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Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grover Press, Inc.p138
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Ibid.
- 13.
Fanon, Frantz. 1990. The Fact of Blackness. In David Goldberg, ed. The Anatomy of Racism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p116
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Ibid.:118.
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Ibid.
- 16.
Fanon, Frantz. 2008. Black Skin White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.
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Ibid.:201.
- 18.
Ibid.:205.
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Ibid.
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Ibid.
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Vic Mafungo “Black Theology” (n.d).
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Ibid.
- 26.
Facebook post, 9 April 2012, in response to Mngxitama’s attack on African culture.
- 27.
Facebook post, 14 June 2012.
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Achille Mbembe, “Fanon and the subject of Emancipation,” WISER, University of the Witwatersrand, 18 April 2012.
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Ibid.
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Ibid.
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Ibid.:149.
- 41.
Black History Month is celebrated all over the black world, including Azania.
- 42.
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Ibid.
- 44.
Raiford, Leigh and Cohen, Michael. 2012. “Black History Month and the Uses of the Past.” Available at http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/02/2012/2224952.html accessed on February 28, 2012.
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Ibid.
- 46.
Du Bois, op cit.
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Edward Wilmot Blyden cited in Lynch, Hollis R, ed. 1971. Black Spokesman. Selected Published Writings of Edward Wilmot Blyden. London: Frank Cass and Co. Ltd.
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Du Bois, op cit.
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Ibid.:80.
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CLR James cited in Rodney, op cit.
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Cabral, Amilcar. 1973. Return to Source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral. Africa Information Service, ed. New York: Monthly Review Press.
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Ibid.
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Fanon, op cit.
- 59.
Cabral, op cit.
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“A Night of Blackness with Dashiki’ and ‘Black Jazz.” Article in SASO Newsletter, March/April 1976.
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Ibid.:93
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- 65.
Ibid.:96.
- 66.
Cabral, op cit.
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Hutton, op cit.
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Ibid.
- 74.
An interview with Aime Cesaire conducted by Rene Depestre at the Cultural Congress of Havana, 1967 in Cesaire, Aime. 1972 [2000]. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by James Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press.
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Nabudere, Dani Wadada. 2011. Afrikology, Philosophy and Wholeness. An Epistemology. Pretoria: AISA.
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Lan, David. 1985. Guns and Rain. Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe. London: James Currey Limited.
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The three are the most prominently and revered national spirit mediums in Zimbabwe, attributed to success of anti-colonial wars.
- 78.
Means Insurrection, refers to anti-colonial liberation struggles in Zimbabwe.
- 79.
Lan, op cit.
- 80.
Ibid.:226.
- 81.
Cabral, op cit.:59.
- 82.
Nabudere, op cit.
- 83.
Ibid.:160.
- 84.
Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from Prison Notebooks. Translated and edited by Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
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Tafira, H.K. (2016). Culture and History in the Black Struggles for Liberation. In: Black Nationalist Thought in South Africa. African Histories and Modernities. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58650-6_9
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