Writer: Masilo Lepuru | Photographs: Supplied

At the heart of white settler colonialism is land dispossession, which was accompanied by epistemicide. The individual and collective identity of the victims of land dispossession and epistemicide is anchored in the territory they have occupied and exercised sovereignty over since time immemorial. Thus, the history of individual and collective identity is also a political history of both the individual and the collective. Identity is never an ahistorical accoutrement of the individual and the collective. Just as an individual has a biography that shapes their identity, a collective has an identity that is memorialized through their political experience. It is in this sense that biographies are essential for the construction and reconstruction of individual and collective identity. This essay will use the example of the biography of Steve Biko by Xolela Mangcu to demonstrate the necessity of biography for the construction and reconstruction of individual and collective identity. The main argument is that Biko and his comrades arrived at the identity of “black” through a reconstruction of the identity “non-white” as a negative identity, transforming it into “black” as a positive identity, and the reduction of “African” to “black” in the inclusive sense.

From The Native to The Bantu

Magema Fuze, a “kholwa intellectual” (Mokoena 2011), wrote a book called The Black People and Whence They Come (1922/2022), to provide a genealogy of black people as a collective. While Fuze was a “civilized native,” he still identified as a black person among other black people whose identity he wanted to explain. Fuze’s book is an example of a biography of a people that discusses their collective identity. Hlonipha Mokoena wrote an intellectual biography of Magema Fuze called Magema Fuze: The Making of a Kholwa Intellectual (2011). In this biography, Mokoena attempts to discuss not only the book by Fuze but Fuze himself as an individual and his identity as a “kholwa intellectual.” Fuze wrote his book in isiZulu, which was later translated into English. He used the term “Abantu abamnyama,” which translates loosely into “black people.” He, as an individual, identified as “umuntu omnyama” or a black person.

Because Fuze traces the history of black people to “precolonial Africa,” he seems to think that the individual and collective identity of “black people” has nothing to do with white settler colonialism. He had the advantage of using his indigenous language, so his understanding of the term “umuntu omnyama” is different from the English equivalent of a “black person,” as defined by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and Steve Biko in I Write What I Like (1987). Fuze was using the term in the historical and cultural sense, while Fanon and Biko were using it in the phenomenological and political sense.

Biko adopted the identity “black” in the context of white settler colonialism in “conqueror South Africa” (Ramose 2024). White settler colonialism, which began in 1652 with wars of colonization (Ramose 2018), was premised on “intellectual warfare” (Carruthers 1999). The latter was based on racism/white supremacy (Welsing 1991), which reduced the Indigenous people to the natives. These natives were seen through the lens of white supremacist political ontology, which regarded them as less than human. According to Patrick Wolfe (2006), settler colonialism is characterized by the “grammar of race” and the “logic of elimination.” The latter is used by the settlers to deprive the natives of their identity so that the settlers can indigenize themselves. This is how Herman Giliomee could write a book called The Afrikaners: Biography of a People (2010). “The Afrikaners” in Giliomee’s narrative are nothing but Dutch settlers who misappropriated the identity “Afrikaners” since the 1800s in the Cape Colony, regarding themselves as a superior white tribe in Africa. While, according to Wolfe (2006), settler colonialism is premised on the antagonism between the native and the settler, others argue that the term “native” is a colonial invention, used as part of British indirect rule (Mamdani 2012).

For the Dutch settlers who conquered the Indigenous people since 1652 in wars of colonization, the Indigenous people were nothing but “kaffirs.” This is a racist construction of the collective identity of the conquered people by European conquerors. Their successors-in-title to conquest invented the name South Africa to label a territory they had dispossessed from the Indigenous people. From 1910, with the consolidation of white settler colonialism on the basis of the “right of conquest,” they created the Union of South Africa at the expense of the real owners of the territory, the Indigenous people. “In the making of the racist state” (Magubane 1996), these white settlers called themselves “South Africans.” On the basis of white “South Africanism” (Dubow 1991), they regarded South Africa as a Whiteman’s land, thus, all whites as “the South Africans.” The biography of Jan Smuts, as written by his son in Jan Christian Smuts (1952), provides chilling white supremacist details.

Because of the white nationalism that underpinned the formation of South Africa “in the wake of” (Sharpe 2006) conquest since 1652, the Indigenous people were excluded from citizenship. They were regarded as “subjects” (Mamdani 2018), while white settlers monopolized white citizenship. As “subjects,” they were regarded as mere “natives,” defeated in wars of colonization but essential for the provision of cheap labor. The South African rulers, on the premise of the “political economy of race and class” (Magubane 1979), created native reserves to deposit the Indigenous people as workers without citizenship. This is under the Native Administration project of the British settlers’ indirect rule (Mamdani 2018). Bernard Magubane provides a good sociological analysis in his autobiography Bernard Magubane: My Life and Times (2010) of the coercive and violent process behind the provision of cheap labor by the Indigenous people to white settlers and why they had to wear European clothes while in the urban spaces of white South Africa.

“The Afrikaners,” through the “right of conquest,” attained their “promised land” (Moodie 1975) in 1948 when they secured political power on the basis of “swaart gevaar.” They upgraded the native administration of the British settlers, which had been used to deal with the “native question” and “black danger” since the conquest in 1652. The Indigenous people were no longer categorized as “natives”; their identity was reconstructed by the Dutch settlers. They were now classified as “Bantu.” This was in terms of the fallacious “Bantu migration theory,” which “the Afrikaners” used to legitimize land dispossession. The Glen Grey Act of 1894 and Natives Land Act of 1913 legitimized land dispossession under the British settlers. “The Afrikaners,” as the “super Afrikaners” of the Afrikaner Bond, invented the Bantu Administration project to upgrade the “black danger” of the British settlers and their Native Administration project to “swaart gevaar.” Thus, the Indigenous people transitioned from being the “natives” to being the “bantus.”

“Bantu” Biko and Black Consciousness

According to Cedric Robinson in Black Marxism (2000), European civilization and culture have a racist, divisive tendency that manifests in the creation of an ontological hierarchy. This “great chain of being” (Ani 1994) is based on the concept of race. Thus, when these European conquerors launched “racial capitalism” (Robinson 2000) and invaded Azania in 1652, they operated on the basis of a “white consciousness” that is inherently racist. According to Felix Chami (2009, 2021) and Motsoko Pheko (1986), Azania is the land of black people. Thus, what is currently called South Africa is the land of black people. But who are these black people? If we follow the archaeological work of Felix Chami, these black people are the Indigenous people, also known as Africans. These are black people in the racial and cultural sense. There are other scholars (Dladla 2021) who hold the view that “black people” are the product of conquest. There were no black people before the wars of conquest since 1652. The Indigenous people became black through a violent process of war and military defeat by the white settlers. So, we have two paradigms regarding black identity: the racial and cultural school of Chami and Pheko, and the political and ontological school of Dladla. In terms of the political and ontological school, the violence of white consciousness invents blacks and the resultant black consciousness. This is similar to how Frank Wilderson, in terms of Afro-pessimism (Wilderson 2020), conceptualizes the oceanic violence of slavery, which transformed different African tribes into the figure of the black as a slave. White consciousness has a dialectical relationship with black consciousness. But because the blacks of the political and ontological school were conquered, this identity of blackness excludes the Indians, who came only in 1860 as indentured servants under British settler administration. The Coloureds are also excluded because they did not exist before the wars of conquest in the racial and ontological sense.

White consciousness defined blacks and blackness in the negative sense. This negative definition is the result of the inherent racism of Europeans in terms of racial capitalism (Robinson 2000). European conquerors who carried this virus of racism became white settlers through land dispossession and epistemicide. Because of their doctrine of white supremacy, they regarded blacks as inferior and without culture and civilization. When Van Riebeeck called the Khoi and San people “black stinking dogs” (Magubane 2005), he was tapping into the “libidinal economy” of anti-blackness of Europeans as humans (Wilderson 2020).

Biko, unlike his brother Khaya, who was a member of the PAC (Mangcu 2017), attempted to do two things with the identity of black and blackness. Biko, who attended universities with a sizeable population of Indians and Coloureds, expanded the identity of black to include them as part of his redefinition of blackness and the invention of black consciousness as a political identity. The system of white supremacy under the Apartheid regime categorized Africans as non-whites. When Biko and his comrades were forming SASO in 1969 (Mangcu 2017), they still used the identity “non-white.” But through their study of Frantz Fanon and the Negritude movement (Mangcu 2017), they transitioned from the negative identity of “non-whites” to blacks as a positive identity. It was their attempt to reclaim blackness as part of an exercise in epistemological self-determination (Epstein 2018). They then dismissed “non-white” as a black person who has a “black skin but wears a white mask.” Biko also, relying on the work of the British political thinker Ambalavaner Sivanandan, redefined blackness into a political identity that is inclusive. It is interesting that Mangcu does not mention Biko’s influence by Sivanandan in his redefinition of blackness as a political identity to include all “non-whites” who are oppressed and discriminated against by whites. Even a superficial perusal of Sivanandan’s book Catching History on the Wing: Race, Culture, and Globalisation (2008) makes it clear that he defined blackness as a political identity before Biko did in the 1970s through the Frank Talk publication (Mangcu 2017). While Mangcu (2017) does refer to the Indigenous and American intellectual influence on Biko, he does not seem to know this British influence. Was Biko perhaps influenced by South African Indians who were part of the Black Consciousness Movement and came across the writings of their fellow Indian in Britain, Ambalavaner Sivanandan? Biko also reconstructed the identity of black following Kwame Ture’s notion of Black Power in the United States in the late 1960s.

The idea of black people as a collective having to work together as a group to deal with white power is reminiscent of Ture’s definition of Black Power within the context of the US. This is what Mabogo More calls “black solidarity.” Unlike Neville Alexander, who emphasized the US origin of Black consciousness, Mangcu (2017) emphasizes its Indigenous origin. Mangcu (2017) does this by tracing the rebellious spirit of Biko to Xhosa warrior kings such as Hintsa. But Mangcu omits to mention the fact that the Indigenous people under Hintsa regarded themselves as Abantu as opposed to black people of Biko’s black consciousness. In other words, the Abantu of Hintsa were Fuze’s “Abantu abamnyama” who were fighting against abelumbi/abelungu. Biko’s name “Bantu” came from this term Abantu. In the correct sense of the term, as Mangcu (2017: 230) alludes to Beth Yengo, who testified about Biko’s humility, “Bantu” is uBantu. uBantu was a child of Abantu, the Indigenous people. It is the same Abantu who, according to the Africanists (Lembede 2015) within the PAC, were transitioning from tribal identity to a national identity of being African when they were invaded by the Europeans.

According to Elias Ntloedibe’s book Here is a Tree: Political Biography of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe (1995), Sobukwe traces the Africanist Movement to this evolutionary process. Of course, Anton Lembede, the original Africanist, had already in the 1940s conceptualized this process of tribal synthesis. It is interesting that Khaya, who lamented the tardy process of Biko becoming politically conscious (Mangcu 2017), would have identified with the Africanists, thus calling himself “Mo-Africa” as opposed to black, as Biko did. Biko did not follow his brother Khaya, as the former reduced Africans to blacks, together with Indians and Coloureds. It is in this sense that Biko constructed and reconstructed his individual identity and the collective identity of the Africans, Indians, and Coloureds to blacks and blackness. He cherished the identity of black to the extent of refusing to be part of the formation of the Black People’s Convention on the basis that the Indians and Coloureds were not consulted. It is this naïve concern with Indians and Coloureds, who hate Africans, that must be confronted in light of the Phoenix Massacre (we must identify as Africans of Lembede as opposed to the blacks of Biko, so that we can expel all these anti-African Europeans, Indians, and Coloureds from Azania). It is in this sense that White (1926: 481) is correct to state that “in trying to estimate the work of a particular philosopher, it seems natural enough to begin with a description of the history and circumstances of the man himself.” It is also in this sense that Alain Badiou (1997) is correct to state that “a philosophy is always the biography of the philosopher.”

In conclusion, this essay has demonstrated the necessity of autobiographies and biographies for the construction and reconstruction of individual and collective identity. In doing so, we argued that Biko’s philosophy of Black consciousness can be understood better through the perusal of his biography, for example, by Xolela Mangcu. Through this biography, we get a better understanding of the circumstances and context that led to Biko’s construction and reconstruction of individual and collective identity from African to non-white and finally to black.

Masilo Lepuru is a researcher and founding director of the Institute for Kemetic and Marcus Garvey Studies (IKMGS).

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