Black Consciousness

In 1968, 15 principled and ambitious students met on the campus of the University of Natal in Durban to begin a journey guided by self-love. Two of these young students, Steve Biko and Mamphela Ramphele, fell in love with each other while dreaming of a life free from oppression and racial discrimination. In 1968, 15 principled and ambitious students met on the campus of the University of Natal in Durban to begin a journey guided by self-love. Two of these young students, Steve Biko and Mamphela Ramphele, fell in love with each other while dreaming of a life free from oppression and racial discrimination.

In this deeply personal book, Hlumelo Biko – who was born of Steve and Mamphela’s union – movingly recounts his parents’ love story and how their message to fellow black South Africans to love themselves helped to change the course of South African history.

Their love story is set against the founding of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), which quickly gained mass support as it swept across the country in the early 1970s. Hlumelo offers an insider’s view on the early years of the movement, thanks to interviews with several founding members like Barney Pityana, Sath Cooper, Charles Sibisi, Malusi Mpumlwana, and his own mother.

While setting out the guiding principles of the movement around a positive black identity, a black theology and practising ubuntu through community programmes, Hlumelo is in a spiritual conversation with his father, who was brutally murdered by the apartheid police in 1977. In writing this book, Hlumelo re-examines what it takes to live a Black Consciousness life in current-day South Africa.

In a critical analysis of the BCM’s influence on the ANC, he shows how the governing party would do better by the majority of citizens if it returned to some of the tenets of Black Consciousness.