Grounded in the South African experience, in discussions
with Blacks about their everyday experiences of oppression and in attitudes
formed from that experience and sharpened by an engagement with Africana
philosophers like Fanon, Steve Biko recreated the kind of praxis that Fanon
suggested in the conclusion of The Wretched of the Earth, namely that the
working out of new concepts cannot come from the intellectual’s head alone but
must come from a dialogue with common people. Today a new shackdweller movement
(Abahlali baseMjondolo) has emerged in South Africa, which has put
post-apartheid society on trial and has resonated with Fanon and Biko's idea of
a decolonized new humanism. At the same time Abahlali's notion of a person and
its critique of reification has been challenged by the spontaneous eruption of
xenophobic violence indicating that the stark choice between humanism and
barbarism is a most concrete question in the shack settlements. Because Biko's
development of Black consciousness and his engagement of Fanon's thought
remains of historic importance to contemporary South Africa, the paper begins
with a focus on the creativity and the contradictory processes by which Fanon's
philosophy of liberation is articulated in Steve Biko's conception of Black
consciousness. From this starting point the discussion shifts from Biko's
critique of white liberalism to the dialectics of contemporary neoliberal
postcolonial reality. What remain central, however, are the creative and
contradictory processes that a reengagement with Fanon will create. In other
words, since it is 'the live subject that unites theory and reality', the issue
becomes how, in a new historic moment, a philosophy born of struggle makes
itself heard.
