Abstract

‘It is Myself, Terror, It is Myself: The Dialogue Between 'Re-creating' Fanonian Consciousness and Steve Biko's Black Pride Movement’ explores the intersection of Frantz Fanon's theories of decolonisation and Steve Biko's Black Consciousness movement. This essay delves into how these two influential figures in anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggles contributed to reclamation of Black identity and agency. By analysing their respective philosophies and activism, I aim to highlight the interconnectedness of their ideas and the enduring relevance of their work in contemporary discourse on race, identity, and liberation. Deferring from superficial interpretations emphasising the ‘violence’ in both Fanon and Biko, or rather the superficial concepts of violence itself, I will put both Fanon and Biko in conversation with other socio-racial theorists in addition to activist groups of equal times and breadth (feminist, ‘Black Power’, LGBTQ+, etc.). I borrow Haynes’ words that ‘the biggest legacy of…colonialism is epistemological’, exploring exactly how and where we can see the implication of ‘Fanonian Consciousness’ in Biko’s Black Pride.

Keywords: South Africa, Activism, Apartheid, Cultural Anthropology, Critical Race Theory, Identity, Liberation

‘An indefinable something that is sure’ - Colonised Consciousness

‘…I have halted, faithful, on the island


standing like Prester John slightly sideways to the sea


and sculptured at snout level by waves and bird droppings
 things


things it is to you that I give


my crazed violent face ripped open in the whirlpool’s depths


my face tender with fragile coves where lymphs are warming


it is myself terror it is myself


the brother of this volcano which certain without saying a word


ruminates an indefinable something that is sure


and passage as well for birds of the wind


which often stop to sleep for a season


it is thyself sweetness it is thyself


run through by the eternal sword
and the entire day advancing


branded with the red-hot iron of foundered things


and of recollected sun’

‘One of the founders of the Négritude movement in Francophone literature’[1], Aimé Césaire published ‘Cahier d’un detour au pays natal’ (of which this poem finds its origins) in 1939, with revisions in 1947 and 1956. Césaire held positions in the French National Assembly until 1993 as a communist representative for Martinique, and Mayor of the capital into the beginning of the 21st century. Césaire charters literal, figurative and surreal journeys, returnings and imaginings through histories and geographies, mixing poetry and prose to address ‘African blackness’ and ‘Black Africanness’ and the impact of colonialism on the Black psyche.

The most significant aspect of Césaire is the move away from the imperial gaze — that of the coloniser addressing the colonised/vice versa. Rather, it is the foregrounding of myself/thyself that establishes his activist poetics as one of self-consciousness. Césaire places his speaker in a perpetual dichotomy of ‘terror’ against ‘sweetness’; a consternation that ‘ruminates an indefinable something that is sure’, that rumbles, infects and splinters the world around him.

Césaire’s speaker’s ‘crazed violent face’ being equal and warring with his same face ‘tender with fragile coves’ is massively emblematic of WEB Du Bois’s theory of ‘Double-Consciousness’[2]. Du Bois speaks of this ‘second sight’ of the colonised Black body, a two way ‘consciousness’ in which one ‘measures…soul by the tape of the (external imperial) world’ and holds this “truth” as the ‘revelation of the…world’. This ‘sensation’, described in 1903 by Du Bois, transcends geography and time, continuing through to the speaker of Césaire’s poetics, imbued no doubt by French colonial forces transforming Césaire’s Martinique into an ‘overseas department’ of France. Du Bois’s ‘warring ideals’ threaten to tear his vision of the colonised body ‘asunder’[3], something Césaire’s speaker cannot escape, trapped, in a cyclical self-monstrosising.

Central to this discussion is the idea of individualised anti-Blackness and its influence on personal identity, world-building, and self-perception, which directly connects to Fanon’s work and the focus of my essay. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon echoes Césaire’s call for a cultural revolution, challenging racial quasi-essentialism. Instead of positioning “blackness” as a singular point of resistance, Fanon highlights how internalised anti-Black racism underpins the very structure and operation of culture itself.

Fanon argues racism; 

‘is never a super-added element discovered by chance…The social constellation, the cultural whole, is deeply modified by … racism.’[4] 

Fanon challenges what Salley describes as the "incommensurability" of imperialised Blackness, framing it as an apocalyptic vision that demands the "incomprehensification" of culture in relation to the Black body, both externally and internally. Fanon asserts, “The end of race prejudice begins with a sudden incomprehension.” He suggests that the dismantling of this cultural system begins when individuals recognise the incomprehensibility of the structures that create and sustain racial alienation. [5][6]

Joanna Frueh references Jennifer Reeder’s New Art Examiner essay that ‘promulgates a Sadeian philosophy of revolution’ through ‘giving a fuck’ as ‘a low life’. She asserts that by ‘embracing the… body we threaten…ideology and the most basic elements of … stratification’[7]. This ‘cultural terrorism’, Freuh argues, lies at the heart of cultural benevolence ‘that…unshame(s) the body’.

It is here the long, but necessary, preamble to the work of Steve Biko becomes evident. In line with Fanon’s existential-phenomenological call that ‘culture is not some aesthetic artefact, but an expression of history, the foundation of liberation, and a means to resist domination’,[8] I look to examine how Biko’s ‘Black Consciousness’ Movement interprets and diverges upon and around Fanon’s ‘Re-Creating’ the self-consciousness. Both negotiate these issues of ‘warring selfhood’ in their helixing methodologies and philosophies. In their respective movements at the height of post-colonial civil rights movements, the two deal with questions of epistemological, phenomenological and cognitive mechanics of Black selfhood.

Moving beyond superficial interpretations that focus on the ‘violence’ in the works of Fanon and Biko—or rather, simplistic notions of violence itself—I aim to place Fanon and Biko in dialogue with other socio-racial theorists and activist movements of comparable eras and scopes, such as feminist, Black Power, and LGBTQ+ groups. Drawing on Haynes’ assertion that ‘the biggest legacy of…colonialism is epistemological’, I will examine how and where the concept of  ‘Fanonian Consciousness’ manifests in Biko’s philosophy of Black Pride.

The Mechanics of Fanonian Consciousness

To begin, I want to define specifically what I mean by Biko’s ‘Black Consciousness’ and its foundation within the works of Fanon. Biko outlines his interpretation in his essay ‘Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity’. Then his South African Students Organisation (SASO) association’s refined definition in the Court of Ideas in 1973 is outlined as ‘an attitude of mind’ and ‘way of life’, reiterating the introspective personal culture inherent to his black pride as a means of permeating lifeworld’s; ‘the most positive to come out of the black world’[9][10].

Biko clarifies that Black Consciousness – at its core – is designed to contest the internalisation of oppressive mantras propagated through anti-blackness, specifically the ‘white gaze’. Biko, along the understandings of cognitive processes detailed in Fanon, explains oppression is formulated as a ‘moral justification’ for ‘economic and social superiority’; an ‘intergenerational lie’ that compounds ‘black hatred’ and makes ‘the black man reduce his (own) basic human dignity’[11].

This perception of Black inferiority is foregrounded in Fanon’s Black Skin/White Masks. Essential to his later works, departing from Blackness ‘as a problem’, Fanon focuses explicitly on the ‘narrativised event of anti-blackness’, highlighting the active phenomenological structures in place that contribute to ‘white racism and black acquiescence''[12].

Using the example of Biko and the visual cultures in segregationist signposting, the relationship between ontology and sociological structures is one founded on white superiority and Black inferiority. This asserts that the latter generates the former, which, in turn, ‘locks subjectivities’ into their racial categories. E.g. The placing of imperial languages as a vernacular first, in bold, and in isolation assert their precedence as culturally acceptable and accessible. In line with classical English texts in the Bantu Education Campaign placed at the zenith of intellect and job reservations disavowing training in skilled work such as engineering[13][14], these only reassert Fanon’s claim that ‘phenomenology, existentialism, and hermeneutics … language, subjectivity…reality are entangled as a matter of essence, not confusion or indistinction’.

Fanon illustrates the existential experience of racialized subjectivity and the ‘calculative logic’ of oppression. The totality of project is what is of importance in my reading; its fastidiousness into language, libidinal economies, and so on, culminating in what Schwarz calls the ‘existential collapse of the individual subject’[15] and what Biko’s Black Pride looks to counteract.

Racial authority in turn becomes decidedly non-placed and formulated to divisiveness. The rhetoric that the Black body could be from anywhere and tainted by anything yet is, either way, ‘decidedly un-South African’[16]. While instances such as the Hair Test shared this arbitrary attribution of un-qualitative race, the specificity of classification functioned to hyper-contest divisions within the Black physical and social bodies by highlighting differences within that as well.

Schwarz goes on to detail the idea of a ‘paradoxical disavowal of race’[17]; both hyper-specified and arbitrarily imposed identifiers that functioned along the Hegelian lord-bondsman dialectic in an intriguing triadic split. There is the socially hegemonized white body serviced as superior by the othered Black body, the latter placed in conflict to another othered once more and too the double exposure of Du Bois and Schwarz[18]. This imposition is reliant upon Hegel’s universality of self-conscious – the recognisant workings of accepting another’s’ consciousness of self. Thus, through these lines of logic, the oppressive structures of anti-Blackness are weaponised through self-consciousness and self-worth. It is here that Fanon’s emphasis on violence as a must in Black liberation is found in Biko’s Black reclamation of consciousness, to ‘make this freedom real by whatever means he deems fit’[19].

Fanon manifests this into a parallel portrayal of Du Bois and Cesaire’s ‘Double Consciousness’, into a resultant ‘zone of non-being’[20]. It is the ‘hell’ of Blackness confronted with its condition in an anti-Black world, that ‘forces the black man inward’, to Biko’s ‘Swart Gevaar’. Descent into the zone of non-being for Fanon and Biko, produces this potentiality for inversion and revolutionary power, revolutionary precisely because the anti-Black world cannot contain or sustain the affirmation of Black consciousness. This claim and this yes is the positivity of what becomes political liberation, and interpreted as overt violence in Fanon’s later work. ‘Re-creating' can only happen when the subject takes up their ‘responsible subjecthood' and refuses to occupy the position of violence-absorbing passive victim[21].

Biko, similarly to Fanon, homes in on the dependence of this reception of consciousness in Hegel’s dialectic. ‘The very method of operation (is reliant) on the basis that the ignorant will learn to know’. Therefore, at the centre of Biko and Fanon is how the negation of this dichotomic relationship is essential to formulating a Black consciousness and humanity that is of its own creation; ‘the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed’.

Fanon displays an inherent concern with cognition and the shaping of values and ideas, but also the absorption and displacement of violence on the self and other oppressed peoples. If the manufacturing of inferiority and characterisation of emotionality acts against authenticity and freedom from externality, the affective cognitive process of epistemological reception and perception of knowledge can only be limited as well.

Therefore, Fanon’s work is quintessential to the ‘demystification’ of human violence and ‘the social systems from which (they) emanate’[22]. They marry in these subsequent understandings that the abolishment of ‘systems of servitude’ is reliant upon the ‘striving of consciousness’. Biko, in turn, surmises the thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis of social revolution. Biko regards in ‘conventional liberalism’, the thesis is segregation, antithesis non-racialism and synthesis ‘very feebly defined’[23]. He proudly declares Black Consciousness defines this differently. The thesis for Biko is not simply ‘strong white racism’ but the negative cry that ‘Black man, you are on your own’. It is instead that Biko claims this isolated space as a ‘re-creating’ of selfhood as representative of a ‘strong solidarity’.

‘Black Pride’ and Biko’s Application of Fanon

One foundational aspect Biko found is the emphasis on formulating ‘Blackness’ as a ‘Black gaze’ through Du Bois’s ‘talented tenth’. Du Bois preached for a future of enlightened members of Black civil rights movements to use college educations and greater opportunities than those before them to take lead of movements[24]. This is not a case of adhering to imperial doctrines on intelligence and privilege of college educations, rather an avenue to diversify and embrace Fanon’s mandates of Pan-Africanism in localised as well as globalised spectrums.

This emphasis culminated in the Black-Only Student Organisation SASO. Biko founded SASO in 1968 - an effort to represent the interests of Black students in the then University of Natal (later KwaZulu-Natal). SASO can be viewed as an affirmed response to the perceived inaction of the National Union of South African Students in representing the needs of Black students. As per the tenets of consciousness defined by both Fanon and Biko, the movement permeated to aspects of broader civil society. Continuing Biko’s fundamentalism of ‘community around the individual’, they established networks of pro-Black ethics, economics and psychology – the Black People’s Convention and South African Student Movement (SASM). These included the adoption of Black Pride symbolism; conveying messages ‘in a nonverbal language that even the most politically uneducated or illiterate person could understand’ – negating imperial monopolies on lexical participation[25].

The Black Pride salute (modelled on Malcom X’s Panthers) ‘functioned as a totemic signal’ where individuals identified a sense of communion as a collective, and Blackness as a language. The growing of ‘afro’ hairstyles, the adoption of Africanist iconography, and the shunning of skin lightening creams helped perform similar functions[26]. Through the arts, ununionized Black workers, theology, cementing reconciliation of student groups and family planning/support, Biko’s SASO had accumulated 41 branches by the end of 1973[27]. The Trial of Ideas the following year only popularised the movement, affirming in their defence the opposition to white hatred and promise that equality will be won through Black Consciousness, being acquitted of revolutionary conspiracy. Poetry, plays, and a satirical song’s inclusion in the prosecution’s evidence was conative of cognitive performance as not only a medium of resistance within the courtroom, but also a matter over which they were being tried.

This focus on education is focused on the cognitive aspect of Fanon and Biko’s movement, divergent on expectations of corporeal violence to one dependent on reversing structures of oppression. Re-education on revisionist views on Makana and Xhosas heritage defined as ‘thieves’ realised Biko’s pledge of ‘Elevating the heroes of Black history’ and ‘extracting the positive values by which black people judge themselves’[28]. Moreover, the Zimeel Trust Fund and Ginsberg Educational Trust were established, refusing to discriminate on party affiliation – focusing on unity rather than division.

Black Pride and Black Power

One can look to Malcom X’s NOI 1957-64 as a divergent model, one Biko ‘notably studied’[29]. The Nation’s, like Biko’s SASO, set precedence on sites of Fanon’s ‘moral and material’ structures of oppressive rule. The two emphasized Black honour, economic independence, the rejection of ‘coloniser’ popular music and entertainment, while providing Arabic and African language lessons through prison outreach[30]. It insisted on individual discipline and self-defence against physical and psychological violence perpetrated by white society. Its theology focused attention on the historic role of people of African descent and opposed the perpetuation of white supremacy.

There is this propensity for community, Fanon’s culture, to help foster a ‘living black consciousness’ shared by Biko; Biko’s Black Community Programmes (BCP) centred community projects that sought to provide ‘the black world (with)…a more human face’[31]. Efforts to nullify the Programme included deportation and relocation, if anything highlighting the fostering of unity paramount to Biko’s Black Consciousness and his focus on the strengthening of self-worth. Biko threw himself into the King William’s Town Office, organising focus projects in health, education, job creation and specifically areas of community development. Not only did isolation compound Biko’s efficacy as activist, but it also benefited ‘buoyancy’ of BCP leadership, generating layers to leadership that helped cultivate ‘universal leadership’. This found fruits in the Zanempilo Clinic, according to Dr Ramphele and Dr Solombela, the most advanced community health centre of its time built without public funding’[32].

While definitive labels such as ‘pride’ and ‘power’ can be reductive when understanding exactly what X and Biko represented and offered to their followers, it is these two buzzwords that enable us to understand just what aspects of cognition the two sought to engage with, helixing around ‘Fanonian Consciousness’. ‘Power’ brings avenues of ‘what is owed’ by the world, whereas Biko’s ‘Pride’ speaks to a perceived inferiority that can only be remedied from within.

X’s NOI reinforced Black selfhood along similar lines, insisting that Black Americans should have and be able to maintain their own businesses, schools, and community/activist organizations. By 1964 the Nation of Islam had grown to over 300,000 members and distributed 500,000 copies a week of its newspaper, ‘Muhammad Speaks’[33]. The Nation’s philosophy inspired a commitment to Black liberation, including the development of Black-owned businesses and a rejection of integration. Similarly, Biko, using the pseudonym Frank Talk, instituted a series in SASO’s newsletter entitled, ‘I Write What I Like’. Here the cultivation of the ‘Black gaze’ takes form, remediating Césaire and emphasising the ‘unlearning of fear’ in Biko’s closing lines in ‘Black Consciousness’.

Similarly to X’s founding of Muslim Mosque Inc and the Organisation of Afro-American Unity post his NOI exit, these ring true of Du Bois’s ‘talented tenth’, and Fanon’s ‘epidermic’ view of race. X proclaimed Islam transcended race through his pilgrimage and his sighting of ‘blue-eyed blondes’ across Mecca. However, the secular pan-African Organisation of Afro American Unity (OAAU) embraced Du Bois' call for the ‘sacrifice of the personal’ by the talented tenth for the greater good of the movement[34]. Not excluding ‘whites’ or other nationalities but focusing his rhetoric on and too ‘his own audience’[35].

The question of internal vs external pride found pertinence in the question of activist integration, one which has found Biko’s application of Fanon both praised and criticised. Stating he needn’t ‘unnecessarily’ concern himself with white South Africans, elected to serve on SRC 1966/7, Biko initially supported multiracial student groupings as ‘the cultivation of community’. With white voices being ‘unable to articulate black experience’, the ‘black gaze’ was maintained, simply a white audience was allowed to listen. This avowal was mainly concerning NUSAS, yet his disillusionment came with NUSAS’s dual edged dealing with the Group Areas Act. While Rhodes University officials were criticised, so were NUSAS’s own Black representatives to ‘act within the limits of the law’[36]. This, to Biko, served as a phenomenological reality of Fanon’s acquiescence of Black to white, even within a reformist space.

The accusations of this acting as racism are reductive. Biko responded by offering his own extension of Touré and Hamilton’s ‘Black Power’ definition of racism as ‘discrimination by a group against another for the purpose of subjugation…one cannot be racist unless he has the power to subjugate’. Touré and Hamilton offer the emphasis of the ‘predication of decisions and policies…for…maintaining control’[37]. It is this manufacturing of oppression that highlights Biko and X’s specificity of audience, Biko himself explaining ‘we cannot be conscious of ourselves and yet remain in bondage’.

Women and Inter-Activist Consciousness

Indeed, even white feminists saw the question of integration as central. Winnifred Breines singles out ‘socialist feminism (as) the feminist current most closely linked to the … Black Movement’, highlighting that ‘for most of those years, Black women rejected and attacked the feminist movement as racist’[38]. Breines compounds Biko’s ‘consciousness of oppression’ as imperative for affiliation and empathy in grammar and vernacular. Brienes notes Black women ‘raising the stunning question’ of the white gaze that instigated plenty of division in 2nd wave feminism;

‘For young whites, the early, idealistic, “family of man” phase … contained the assumption that …universalist ideals, like integration, made the one who upholds them into a newer sort of white person than most white people’[39].

It is this vision of a “newer sort of white person” that Brienes details instigated these consternations: ‘white feminists embraced gender identity politics…but they …harboured a political image of universal community that made little sense to women who were not like them’.

In this quotation we see a meshing of Bienne to Biko’s Fanonian race-trumping-class analysis of the social self, perhaps intriguingly from a white feminist. This manifestation of the ‘family of man’ utopian ideology outlined by Brienes outlines Biko’s argument of ‘black liberty in white clothing’[40]. ‘Utopia’ that simply includes other genders and races, not one that is forged by the ‘othered’ themselves. This argument of ‘best-able’ – who is to be the best at leading activist groups – extended both Breines’ acceptance of white privilege furthering division and action against this passivity of spectatorship in the Black body.

However, with Breines’ introduction, we see the way this imperialised self-inferiority not only pervaded white and Black minds, but gender and sexuality also. Biko was ‘willing to work with women’[41], yet (in line with Ming Wahl’s analysis of Fanon) excluded women as active social agents[42]. Biko’s Black Consciousness jarringly precludes the mention of women (despite an equal gender split of SASO) while pressing the heteronormative ‘he’ over 30 times. Magaziner even contests Black women had to ‘assert themselves as ‘black men’. ‘Black Consciousness’, she continues, ‘argued …'the black man has become a shell, a shadow of a man’ and strove to make him - and through him, the entire Black community - a man once more’. The conscious silences and stressed syllables convey an oppressive lexicon that ‘was intrinsically sexist’, Biko pointedly struggling to concede ‘that traditional gender roles could change’.

That is not to say Fanon cannot be interpreted in women’s and queer studies. Magaziner highlights a SASO contemporary in Justice Moloto – a fellow Fanonian graduate – who preached theology sermons on women’s issues with UCM; founded by Biko, but notably lacking his attendance. Moreover, Sandy Stone’s Posttransexual Manifesto echoes Biko’s Fanonism in every regard. Critiquing conventional research, both pro and anti-oppressed, the classification of oppressed individuals as ‘too illogical/damaged’ in addition to the facilitating of binary social bodies[43]. Stone interestingly draws comparisons between the ‘social phenomena’ precluding transgender individuals participating in their own discourse and other civil rights groups including Biko’s Black Consciousness. Comparisons are drawn through othering via paranoia and fear that becomes projected onto the oppressed experience. i.e. ‘...robots of an insidious and menacing patriarchy, an alien army designed and constructed to infiltrate, pervert and destroy 'true' women’.

The words of Stone near perfectly refract Crath’s [44] extension of Fanon’s ‘Alien Nation’ regarding ‘Queer Consciousness’, that ‘libertarian ideology holds that (in) assertions of race, class, or gender … false opposition is created, placing women and people of colour on one side (each) of the utopian equation’[45]. Both Crath and Stone assert the essentiality of ‘raising consciousness’, the social theory itself founded upon the principle of Fanon; subverting imperialised expectations on oppressed intellect, a gap functional on race, class, gendered and ideological lines. ‘A self-fulfilling prophecy’ Nelson calls it, with the focus on the divide itself ‘paralyzing the thinking even of those who seek to bridge it’.

Both Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko found themselves navigating liberation movements fraught with tension, as opponents within these movements often presented more reformist approaches to colonial and racial subjugation. These competing ideologies frequently underscored the difficulty of reconciling revolutionary visions with incremental, institutional change. Fanon, for instance, was critical of what he saw as the complacency of the colonised elite, those who sought to reform colonial systems rather than dismantle them entirely. In The Wretched of the Earth, and Black Skin White Masks he warned of the post-independence bourgeoisie’s tendency to replicate the oppressive structures of colonial rule. Similarly, Biko confronted challenges from within the anti-apartheid movement, where certain factions advocated for integrationist policies rather than the radical reconstitution of Black identity and autonomy central to his philosophy of Black Consciousness.

This divide between reformist and radical ideologies speaks to a broader tension within liberation movements: the question of how much of the oppressor’s system—its epistemologies, institutions, and cultural frameworks—should be retained in the process of achieving liberation. Fanon and Biko shared a belief in the necessity of epistemological rupture: a complete unmaking and reimagining of the self and society. This vision positioned them at odds with those who viewed reconciliation or gradual change as pragmatic solutions.

Interestingly, the epistemological focus in both thinkers' work found resonance beyond racial liberation movements, influencing other struggles against systemic oppression. Second-wave feminist consciousness-raising, for example, adopted similar critiques of internalised subjugation under the male gaze. Feminists like Kate Millett and Bell Hooks challenged the patriarchal construction of gender and sexuality, recognising parallels to Fanon’s and Biko’s explorations of how domination operates through the psyche. By exposing the pervasive nature of the male gaze, they laid bare the ways women were conditioned to view themselves through external, oppressive standards.

Moreover, these feminists echoed Fanon’s rejection of essentialism. Just as Fanon resisted reductive notions of ‘authentic Blackness’, second-wave feminists grappled with the essentialisation of womanhood. The idea that there could be a singular, universal experience of being Black or being a woman was interrogated and dismantled in both movements, leading to more nuanced understandings of identity as intersectional and fluid.

The methodological similarities also extended to how both movements utilised personal narratives as tools of liberation. Feminist consciousness-raising groups invited women to share their lived experiences, creating a collective understanding of oppression as structural rather than individual. This approach mirrors Fanon’s call for a reconstitution of selfhood through collective cultural and historical reclamation. Steve Biko’s emphasis on pride in Black identity also echoes this sentiment; by reframing what it meant to be Black under apartheid, Biko offered a way to resist the internalisation of inferiority.

These overlapping practices underscore the ways in which Fanon’s and Biko’s ideas about the mechanics of selfhood and resistance transcended their immediate contexts. The feminist adoption of consciousness-raising, for example, borrowed not only the emphasis on disrupting oppressive epistemologies but also the conviction that liberation requires a reimagining of culture from the ground up.

The intersections between these movements highlight both the strengths and limitations of radical ideologies. While Fanon and Biko offered transformative visions, their uncompromising positions sometimes alienated potential allies within their respective struggles. Similarly, second-wave feminism’s exclusion of voices from other intersections, particularly race and sexuality, demonstrated how even revolutionary movements can perpetuate oppression if they fail to adopt truly inclusive frameworks. By placing these movements in conversation, we can better understand how epistemological ruptures, consciousness-raising, and identity reclamation have been employed—and contested—across diverse struggles for liberation.

Both Fanon and Biko operated in contexts where the intellectual and activist discourse was overwhelmingly dominated by male voices, which shaped the framing and reception of their work. While their theories of decolonisation and Black consciousness sought to dismantle systemic oppression, their perspectives often overlooked the intersections of gender within these struggles. This male-dominated framing sometimes resulted in a limited consideration of how colonial and racial subjugation were compounded by patriarchal structures, especially for women within these movements.

Fanon’s writings, particularly in The Wretched of the Earth, are deeply rooted in the collective struggle of colonised peoples. Yet, his analysis tends to universalise the experience of the colonised subject, often centring male perspectives and omitting the gendered dimensions of colonial violence. Women, in Fanon’s framework, are frequently positioned as symbols of cultural purity or resistance, rather than as active agents with distinct experiences and contributions. Similarly, while Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement was groundbreaking in its reclamation of Black identity, it often perpetuated the patriarchal norms of its time by focusing predominantly on the liberation of Black men, with less emphasis on the unique struggles faced by Black women under apartheid.

This oversight was not without consequence. Women in both movements frequently found themselves sidelined, their voices and perspectives treated as secondary to the broader liberation agenda. However, feminist critiques of Fanon’s and Biko’s work have since illuminated the gaps in their theories, demonstrating how gendered oppression is inseparable from racial and colonial oppression. For example, scholars like Bell Hooks and Sylvia Tamale have argued for a more intersectional approach that accounts for the compounded effects of race, gender, and class.

In the context of Biko’s movement, Black women activists like Winnie Mandela and others within the Women’s League of the African National Congress highlighted the need for a more inclusive vision of liberation. They demonstrated that the struggle against apartheid required not only the dismantling of racial hierarchies but also the eradication of patriarchal oppression within the movement itself.

Addressing these critiques is essential to understanding the full impact of Fanon’s and Biko’s legacies. While their works remain foundational to discussions of liberation and decolonisation, integrating feminist and intersectional perspectives allows us to build on their ideas in ways that are more inclusive and representative of the diverse realities of oppression.

‘A New Consciousness’

In closing, the influence of Fanon on Biko is undeniable. Practice, policy and philosophy, the permeation of ‘re-creating consciousness’ strikes at the heart of Biko’s movement. Fanon ‘tells how colonization looks from inside the skull’, establishing the interiority that his cultural counter-discourse is predicated upon; the disruption of external binary divides/understandings being forced upon the individual. This aspect of monistic discourse is what Biko acts against, to remedy what Stone calls ‘the imperfect solution to personal dissonance’ that reflects Biko’s Fanonist criticisms of ‘assimilation’ of Blackness and “‘peaking for blackness’.

While fair critique of Biko’s work being from the standpoint of a heteronormative and hyper-male gaze can be given, hence seemingly at odds with Fanon’s epistemological liberation, it must also be recognised that Fanon himself had similar critiques. Indeed, not to detract the agency of women activists with Biko, Asha Rambally asserts this was a conscious decision on their part to address racial oppression as a first[46]. They had made 'a strategic choice' to shelve specifically gendered concerns 'in the face of opposition from a seemingly invincible white nationalist party-state that was quick to exploit any sign of division in order to subjugate Black people even further'.

Fanon’s legacy remains well noted. Yet, Biko has had decidedly ‘less traction’ in academic circles than the man who inspired him[47]. Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement was one steeped in socio-political theory and complex epistemological philosophies. Noting his successes and pitfalls, one can negotiate Stone echoing Anzaldúa’s ‘new Mestiza’ to reach a ‘new consciousness’ in post-colonial activism. An individual aware of their conflicting/meshing identities, with these ‘new angles of vision’ working to negate intra-activist separatism and look to overcome Césaire’s ‘warring self-hood’; the pride in the Black/trans/human body to not be weighed down by an internal divide, but to explore and overcome it.

Footnotes:

[1] Daniel Balderston and Mike Gonzalez, “Encyclopedia of 20th Century Latin American and Carribean Literature, 1900-2003’ (London & New York: Routledge, 2004), p128-130 

[2] Bruce Dickson  “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness.” American Literature 64, no. 2 (California: Duke University Press 1992): 299–309. https://doi.org/10.2307/2927837. 

[3] W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Souls of Black Folk” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p128, 134 

[4] Frantz Fanon, “Racism and Culture” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018), p1361

[5] Fanon, Theory and Criticism, p1365 

[6] Raél Jero Salley “Potentials of Exchange, Fellowship, and Love: Contemporary Art, Citizenship and Performance in South Africa” Contemporary Citizenship, Art and Visual Culture: Making and Being Made. Ed. Corey Dzenko and Theresa Avila. (London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2022) p60-76 

[7] Joanna Frueh, “Monster/Beauty: Building the Body of Love” (Berkley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press, 2001), p290 

[8] Fanon, Theory and Criticism, p 1364 

[9] Steve Biko, and Basil Moore, “Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity / by Steve Biko”. (London: Christian Institute Trustees, 1977) 

[10] Justice W. G. Boshoff “SASO’s Definition of Black Conciousness” (1972) 

[11]  Biko, Black Consciousness 

[12] Frantz Fanon, “Black Skin/White Masks”, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018), p1353

[13] Robin Cohen, Yvonne Muthien & Abebe Zegeye, “Repression and Resistance: Insider Accounts of Apartheid” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p67 

[14] Richard Dale, "African Opposition in South Africa: The Failure of Passive Resistance”. (Stanford: The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, 1967), p143  

[15] Bill Schwarz, interviewed by Caine Lewin Turner “Double Exposure: Race”, Hutchins Centre, 22 Nov 2022

[16] Sue Valentine,. “An Appalling Science” ( Sunday Times Heritage Project/The Times, 23 April 2012) 

[17] Schwarz, interview 

[18] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “The Master-Slave Dialectic” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018), p549 

[19] Biko, Black Consciousness 

[20] Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, p1352 

[21] Frantz Fanon, “The Wretched of the Earth”, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018), p1360 

[22] Frantz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018), p1354 

[23] Biko, Black Consciousness 

[24] Chelsey Parrot-Sheffer, “Talented Tenth: W.E. Du Bois” (Britannica, 2023) 

[25] Gail Gerhart “Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an Ideology”. (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1978)  

[26] Marcus Morgan, “Performance and Power in Social Movements: Biko’s Role as a Witness in the SASO/BPC Trial”. Cultural Sociology, 12(4),. https://doi.org/10.1177/1749975517752586 2018) p 456-477 

[27] Itumeleng Mekoa, “The Dialogue between Pan-Africanist Philosophy and Black Consciousness in South Africa in their Search for African Unity during the Struggle against Apartheid” The Journal of Nation Building and Policy Studies (North West University, 2021) 

[28] Biko, Black Consciousness 

[29] Steve Biko Foundation 

[30] Fahriye Begüm Yildizeli, “An Analysis on the Relationship Between Religion & the Black Awakening: American South & South Africa” (Celalabat, Turkish Social Science Institute, 2018) 

[31] Biko, Black Consciousness 

[32] Steve Biko Foundation 

[33] Louis A. DeCaro, “On the Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X”. (NYU Press, 1996) http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qg5h8. 

[34] Malcolm X, Autobiography, (New York: Bentam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, 1987) p390–391 

[35] Fanon, Black Skin/White Masks 

[36] Geraldine Freislaar, “Steve Biko: The SASO Years” (Johannesburg: South African History Archive, 2022) 

[37] Kwame Touré & Charles V. Hamilton, “Black Power: The Politics of Liberation” (New York: Random House, 1992) p167 

[38] Winifred Breines, 'Introduction', The Trouble between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement. (New York, 2006; online edn, Oxford Academic, 1 Sept. 2007) https://doi-org.libproxy.york.ac.uk/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195179040.003.0001

[39] Breines, “The Trouble Between us” 

[40] Leslie Anne Hadfield, “Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement” (Oxford Online Research Encyclopaedias, 2017) 

[41] Daniel R. Magaziner, “Pieces of a (Wo)Man: Feminism, Gender and Adulthood in Black Consciousness, 1968—1977.” Journal of Southern African Studies 37, no. 1 (2011): 45–61. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29778087. 

[42] Emma Ming. Wahl, “Black Women in Fanon’s Black Skin/White Masks: The Intersection of Race, Gender, and Oppression’ (Seattle: Stance International) 2021, p48-51 

[43] Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto” (Austin: The University of Texas, 1987) 

[44] Rory Crath, “Chapter Six; Reading Fanon in ‘Homosexual Territory’: Towards the Queering of a Queer Pedagogy.” Counterpoints 368 (http://www.jstor.org/stable/42980669. 2010) 

[45] Alondra Nelson, “Afro-futurism: Past-Future Visions” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018) 

[46] Magaziner, “Pieces of a (Wo)man” 

[47] Pal Ahluwalia & Abebe Zegeye, “Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko: Towards Liberation” (Johannesburg: Taylor and Francis Group, 2010) 

References

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