ABSTRACT

This chapter provides an overview of the development of Black Consciousness in South Africa, its links to Pan Africanism and its legacy in the country. The author has opted for a long chronological approach and a discussion of Black Consciousness before and after the Black Consciousness Movement (1968–1977), to emphasise the time-depth and longevity of its ideas. The chapter also stresses the significance of anticolonial struggles in the region for informing Black historical consciousness, as well as the independence of African countries that had been gathering pace from 1960, the so-called ‘year of Africa’. It is against this backdrop that perhaps the most infamous regime of white supremacy of the latter half of the twentieth century, the apartheid state, stood. The principles of self-worth and pride in blackness that the Black Consciousness activists would articulate from 1970 onwards echoed earlier traditions of thought and struggles in the country.