A Human Face: Biko’s Conceptions of African Culture and Humanism

Oliphant, Andries Walter

doi:10.1057/9780230613379_12

Cited by 4 publications

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“…The adoption in 1955 of the Freedom Charter, wherein post-Apartheid South Africa was imagined as a non-racial society that belongs to all who live in it, is perhaps among the early attempts of a politically constituted humaning process. The Black Consciousness Movement and Bantu Stephen Biko's explications of a collectivist relational ontology located in psycho-political praxes (Alexander & Gibson 2008;Biko 2004;Mngxitama, Alexander & Gibson 2008;Oliphant 2008;Suffla & Seedat, forthcoming), and Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe's articulations of anti-racist ontology, influenced by Pan-Africanist thought (Hook 2019;Pogrund 1991), may be considered as contesting forms of the many humaning interventions in the country (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013). The adoption of the South African Constitution in May 1996 is a more recent example of an intervention aimed at reconstitution of the political that connected with the quest for humaning, albeit perhaps implicitly.…”

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Mbeki’s ‘I am an African’ Speech: Mobilising Psycho-Political Resources for Political Reconstitution of Post-Apartheid South Africa

2021

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We offer a critical reading of Thabo Mbeki's 'I am an African' speech to illustrate how he foregrounded humaning, namely ontoepistemological recovery, as a key dimension of psycho-political reconstruction. Mbeki's speech, delivered on the occasion of the adoption of South Africa's democratic Constitution, was inherent to the larger quest to (re)imagine South Africa and (South)Africanness and assert independent Black intellectual thought. Positioning himself as an epistemic agent, Mbeki historicised that moment of adopting the Constitution and attempted to raise critical consciousness about the protracted struggle for democracy. He mobilised marginalised knowledge about the anti-colonial struggle to challenge forgetfulness and limited interpretations of South Africa's negotiated settlement. Mbeki also invoked the idea of a relational ontology and hermeneutic love to effect an inclusive Africanity constituted of multiple histories and 'races'. Mbeki, resisting Afro-pessimism, referenced the making of an inclusive Africanity against Africa as a generative place despite the colonial encounter, African humanism and South Africa's aspirations for reconciliation as articulated by the ANC and the Constitution. Notwithstanding the psycho-political import of Mbeki's speech, the process of humaning remains incomplete.

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confidence: 99%