The Role of Radical Pedagogy in the South African Students Organisation and the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa, 1968–1973

ABSTRACT

Radical pedagogical ideals and practices were at the heart of the South African Students Organisation (SASO), the formation that birthed the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) at the height of the internal anti-apartheid struggle in the 1970s. This paper sets out to illuminate and examine the educational agenda of SASO and the early BCM by analysing the rich archive of SASO, including the organisation's minutes, reports, policy documents, and newsletter, as well as their engagement with the ideas of the radical Brazilian educationalist, Paulo Freire. This article investigates a central tension in the student-led BCM around the place and nature of education in the movement. The central tension, I argue, was between the critical educational project of transforming consciousness and the political education project of directing black people's energies against the white state. Despite their intersection, they were, I argue, different responses to the oppressive apartheid context. The BCM understood their work to be against the ‘false consciousness’ of white supremacy in the lives of its black subjects, a state of mind where black people could not recognise racist injustice in their lives, and as a result did not join with others in a similar position in an attempt to fight injustice. The BCM leaders were clear that ‘false consciousness’ could only be undone through a sustained critical educational project in which each black person had to confront and transform her/his own consciousness. While the BCM began with such a critical education project, it was later supplanted by a less rigorous political education project, one that sought quick community action to solve urgent social problems and ignite the masses to resist apartheid at the level of society. This mass political education project came to trump the critical educational project of carefully and thoroughly transforming consciousness at the level of the individual. To engage in the transformation of society through education, I suggest that resistance movements need to work at both the individual and collective levels, and need to resist prioritising one over the other.

Keywords:

• education
• black consciousness
• movements
• Freire
• praxis
• SASO
• radical pedagogy
• South Africa