and awareness. This is what we need in South Africa for a meaningful change to the status quo. The way to the future is not through a directionless multiracialism but through a positive unilateral approach. Black men, you are on your own.
The ultimate irony had occurred. Apartheid, designed to suppress
a unified black response, had created precisely such a response. In denying
validity to any claim by blacks to even the slightest share in a common
multiracial society, the racists had driven the most articulate young blacks
into claiming not merely a share but the dominant share in such a society--on
their own terms.
The young Steve Biko and his colleague had seized the shoulder of the sleeping giant of black awareness in South Africa to shake him from his slumber. And more than that: to raise him to his feet, to stretch him to his full height and to place him for the first time into the attitudes of total challenge toward all who had sought to keep him prone. Black Consciousness was born, a new totality of black response to white power, and with it a new era in the racial struggle in South Africa.
And with it was born the increasingly perceptible leadership
of Steve Biko. Despite all his efforts to keep in the background, to generate
collective leadership on a broad front so that the movement would be one
of all the people rather than a movement tied to one personality, his own
modesty was no proof against the inexorable processes whereby even the
most able group of men will turn to one among them in some form of acknowledgement
that he, more than any other, is their recognized guide. Though the Black
Consciousness movement from the beginning produced a wide array of gifted
leaders and spokesmen, it was the name of
(copyright 1978 by Donald Woods)