Biko that increasingly worked its way to the fore out of this large group in the months and years ahead, and by the dawn of the decade of the 1970s there were already signs that the young Steve Biko was the personification of an immense new force at the forefront of black politics in South Africa.
In the process of mobilizing blacks against the white racists, the Black Consciousness advocates felt they first had to wean their fellow blacks away from the white antiracists, the white liberals, by attacking liberalism itself. As a liberal, I was therefore one of those whose first awareness of Black Consciousness was through attacks by people like Biko on all that I personally believed in, in the South African political context. I, after all, was one of these white liberals whose "paternalism" and "negative influence" were under attack, along with my liberal heroes like Alan Paton. We liberals believed in a common nonracial society in South Africa, in an end to all apartheid and in a brotherhood among all South Africans of every race, creed and color. We could not see that, for young blacks in our repressed society, such concepts were utterly impractical, and that our unavailing efforts to achieve these ideals were no longer adequate.
There were few enough of us, in all conscience. Few white
South Africans shared our anti-apartheid views, and even for many of us
who described ourselves as liberal, a long political road had had to be
traveled away from racism.
This was certainly so in my case.
(copyright 1978 by Donald Woods)
TO SEE TERM OF REFERENCE 4) TO THE CHRISTMAS, 1987 REGISTERED LETTER TO P.W. BOTHA: THE MAY 10, 1986 STATEMENT TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL, TAKE YOUR NEXT FOOTSTEP HERE .