Black Consciousness poetry: writing against apartheid

Ngwenya, Thengani H.

doi:10.1017/chol9780521199285.026

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Critical attention to Black Consciousness in South African literature has focused mostly on black writers affiliated with the movement, especially the so-called Soweto poets that included Mongane Wally Serote, Njabulo Ndebele, Sipho Sepamla, Mafika Gwala, Mbulelo Mzamane, Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali, and Boyd Makhoba (see Attwell, 2005; Mzamane, 1992; Ngwenya, 2012). More recently, Shannen Hill (2015) has addressed the visual culture of Black Consciousness.…”

Section: Introduction: Inequality “Separate Development” and The Nementioning

confidence: 99%

Equality or unity? Black Consciousness, white solidarity, and the new South Africa in Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter and July’s People

Powell

2017

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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In the early 1970s, the Black Consciousness movement called on black radicals to dissociate themselves from dissident white South Africans, who were accused of frustrating the anti-apartheid cause in order to safeguard their ill-gotten privileges. In turn, liberal whites condemned this separatism as a capitulation to apartheid’s vision of “separate development”, despite the movement’s avowed aspiration towards a nonracial South Africa. This article considers how black separatism affected Nadine Gordimer’s own perspective on the prospect of achieving this aspiration. For Gordimer, Black Consciousness was necessary for black liberation, and she sought ways of reconciling white dissidents with black separatism. Still, these efforts didn’t always sit well together with her continuing belief that if there were to be a place for whites in a majority-ruled South Africa, then they needed to join blacks in a “common culture”. I consider how this tension marks Gordimer’s portraits of whites responding to being rejected by blacks in Burger’s Daughter and July’s People. In both novels, white efforts to resist apartheid’s racial segregations appear to be at odds with black self-liberation, with the effect that whites must find a way of doing without the as-yet deferred prospect of establishing a “common culture” in South Africa.

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Section: Introduction: Inequality “Separate Development” and The Nementioning

confidence: 99%