A Reading of Relations between Black Consciousness and Congress-aligned activists in Lenasia

I want to attempt a certain reading of the clashes between Black Consciousness and Congress tendencies in Lenasia in the period from the early 1970s to the 1990s. It is an attempt to render the ideas that were circulating within Lenasia and between it and the national and international scene. It is also an occasion to make observations about the nature of each movement and to contrast them, in the hope that this might give us a greater understanding of political activity in that and subsequent periods. A Brief History of Politics in Lenasia Congress traditions hardly had a presence in Lenasia before the later 1970s, even though the town had been established as a Group Area in the early 1950s. The very move to Lenasia was seen by Congress leaders as something to be boycotted, but the failure of Congress leaders to take account of the class divisions in Fietas made their recommendations impractical. The poorest were living in appalling conditions, paying exorbitant rents to landlords who were unscrupulous. The possibility of better living conditions in Lenasia predisposed the poorest to the move, and move they did. By the early 1960s, the crackdown on the PAC and Congress organisations left Lenasia, as well as the country, bereft of forms of political opposition. In the meanwhile, government-sponsored representation began to take root, and RAM Saloojee, at the time a politically ambiguous figure, participated in government structures while expressing scepticism regarding their efficacy. When Ahmed Timol was killed in November 1971 a meeting was held to mourn his death, probably one of the earliest public act of resistance in Lenasia. But it was the Black Consciousness activists who first gave a presence to antiapartheid activities. They set up the Peoples Experimental Theatre and staged a number of plays in the early 1970s, and created the space for anti-apartheid activities. According to some reports it was the largest SASO branch in an Indian area in the country. But by the late 1970s, their efforts had hit a ceiling, and the movement waned. After this, there were sporadic attempts to make political interventions, but these are eclipsed by Congress activities. Congress activists hijacked the Anti-SAIC Committee when they bussed in supporters from other Indian areas, an exercise they unashamedly saw as a legitimate tactic. Thereafter they became the main force in anti-apartheid activities in the town, right through to the election in 1994. Clashes between the two tendencies took place on various levels, from arguments about strategy, ideology and ultimate objectives, to violent physical confrontations.

Black Consciousness in Lenasia By the late 1960s, Black Consciousness was beginning to emerge, and its presence in Lenasia was the result of a few key individuals, foremost among them Sadeque Variava, a figure who exerted a charismatic spell over his peers. The first expressions of BC on the Johannesburg Indian scene came when Variava and Luke Cajee mounted a protest at the Indian Teachers Teaching College in Fordsburg, effectively closing it down in solidarity with those protesting against the expulsion of Onkgopotse Tiro from Turfloop University. Variava and his peers formed the Peoples Experimental Theatre group, an art group that staged a number productions in Lenasia. It has to be understood that these events, which in other circumstances might have been perceived as aesthetic activity at a distance from political concerns, were actually quite bold forays into national politics at a time when the state was finely tuned to forms of subversion, and which acted to stamp these out. Much of the black population had been bludgeoned into silence, and fear of state reprisal ensured that few if any expressions of resistance emerged. The activists were themselves fighting to overcome their own fears, generating a psychology that depended on bravado, on the denial of real danger, and perhaps on the selfrighteousness of the converted. Put simply, they came across as fearless, as dangerous, and to some, bordering on craziness. This histrionic mode of engagement and I use the word here in a positive sense was a response to the machinations of the repressive apparatuses, which relied on the pragmatism of reasonable subjects who would calculate the odds and decide against subversion. The histrionic mode, on the other hand, eschews the Reason of the pragmatic, common sense course, and constructs a new universe designed to subvert and destroy the normal world. The tenor of this mode of engagement was designed to overcome fear at the same time that it injected fear into the oppressor. The state was coming face to face with a new subject, one that defied normality, one that refused to be intimidated by a formidable machine that reached into the very psyche of the oppressed. In Lenasia this mode was reproduced, but in a manner that was coloured by local conditions and the peculiarities of the Indian township. Indian activists who defined themselves as Black were caught in a strange psychology, one that deployed denial and affirmation in a quite conscious manner. The Horizon of Black Consciousness A Manichean mode of thinking emerged that drew lines, dividing an us from a them. Slogans marking these divisions circulated: one is part of the system or against it, one is an oppressor or oppressed, one is Black or one is White.

In keeping with this Manichean orientation, there was necessarily a desire to bring these opposed camps into a confrontation. It is not enough that we divide the world in two, the point is for an us to clash with a them. A complete ethic of confrontation emerges with Black Consciousness, even if its varieties are tempered by its more circumspect adherents, Biko perhaps being the most famous of these. Elements of the counterculture of the metropoles filter through: the theatre of the absurd resonates with this generation, with its challenge to dramatic conventions, especially its play with the relations between author and actor, actor and audience, in attempts to eradicate hierarchies and make theatre existentially effective. Black Consciousness was always on the lookout for hierarchy, and eager to dismantle it. The student revolts of the 1960s; the hippie suspicion of authority and hierarchy, parallel movements in the metropoles but lived in a veritable state of origin, predisposed BC to a more anarchist than Stalinist mode, but at the same time hobbled any efforts at statist projects. The conflict of the generations, and the reification of the so-called generation gap, takes on a particular significance in South Africa, where the defeated generation is accused of cowardice by youthful firebrands. Making the Indian Black Within this context, the Indian BC activist was faced with a series of dilemmas. He or She had to dispense with every aspect of Indian identity in order to line up with the Black African in a titanic struggle against White Power. As everyone knows, any attempt to shrug off ones formation is bound to be successful in only a limited manner. When the Indian activist was with the African activist, he was compelled by an entire historical complex as opposed to a complex afflicting an individual to prove that he was Black. He would be tempted to adopt the language and style of the Black, he would become Black. He was Black. To be seen as Black by the Authentic, supposedly biological Black, was the highest form of acceptance, not only a means to the end of apartheid, but the end of apartheid within oneself. Within this setting, the BC intervention surpasses the limits of ANC and PAC philosophies by constituting a new political subject, since the black political subject had been expunged from the body politic. The creation of the Black political subject is the first task of Black Consciousness, and the intervention must be psychological because politics has been extinguished, but this psychological intervention was animated by a project that from its inception was profoundly political in inspiration. By defining Black as a state of mind, the movement creates the political subject, and at the same time opens the gates to all of the oppressed. For the Indian activist this means that one is able to discard ones biological identity in favour of a self-defined identity. It resolves, at one stroke, the crisis of identity that the Indian activist suffers from. But it is a precarious identity. As a

state of mind, and we know how states of mind emerge and pass into nothingness, the conditions that enable one to see oneself in a particular way are subject to minute changes. Different situations allow for different identities, and in the bosom of the family, the activist is not regarded as black, but as histrionic, here in the negative sense.

The Ethos of Black Consciousness: Postmodernism in Lenasia Black Consciousness was a movement forged around the crucial date of 1968, at the beginnings of a worldwide transition to the postmodernist era. It was and was not postmodernist the postmodern is most clearly discernable in the metropoles, and we need to clarify the manner in which international global shifts such as these are received, reflected and perhaps even invented in developing regions. Aspects of the BC movements culture set it apart from earlier forms of resistance. BC was not a movement geared towards the conquest of state power: that was a goal too remote from the realms of possibility. BC was steeped in an anti-apartheid, but also anti-establishment, ethos, in a rejection of authority, whether white or black, and by a built-in aversion to dogma even if BC itself cohered into dogma later on. The episode only serves to prove that even movements with strictures against dogmatism can be prone to dogma and reification. BC operated a paradoxical project, in which it tried to mobilise people at the same time that it wanted people to choose by themselves to be mobilised. While BC desired freedom for all Black people, it sought not to impose freedom or the desire for it. This approached evinced a concept of freedom in quite stark contrast to the freedom that is the goal of national liberation. BC sought to conjure liberation before apartheid was abolished. BC thinkers were attempting to restore a subjectivity to apartheids non-subject. Apartheid tried, and to some extent succeeded, in making of the Black a being bereft of subjecthood. Becoming subject was one stage in the programme of Black Consciousness. More than this, or perhaps at the same time, the goal of achieving a subjectivity free of apartheid conditioning, of shedding the imposed inferiority complex, was also a quest for a subjectivity that was free, open, unencumbered, at peace with itself even though at war with the structures of domination. In this quest, spontaneity took on a significant value, to the point perhaps of being fetishised, and this explains in part BCs aversion to hierarchy and party discipline. Drink and dagga were the lubricants of liberation and cohesion. Intoxication was necessary for a mind fraught with the toxicity of apartheid and weighed down by insurmountable forces. Dagga was the Peoples Drug, consumed by black people

throughout the country, from the lowly watchman to the university student. It brought a reverie that would not otherwise be possible in an oppressed population, it brought a freedom of thought, a play of words and associations that reeked of real freedom, the liberation that produces laughter. Dagga dissolved Reason in order to expand the minds capacity to apprehend. Experiment was the (dis-)order of the day.

The Ethos of Congress Politics The culture of the Congress movement was largely determined by a political and ideological project steeped in an appeal to human rights. As such it was conservative, depending on its subjects to model themselves on the Mandelas of this world. Wearing suits and ties, these modernists rejected tribal and ethnic identities in search of an urban identity. Their politics was based on Gandhian and SACP methods, passive resistance coupled with strategy and tactics. The Congress movement was from the beginning an alliance of nationalists, communists, socialists, liberals and more ill-defined anti-apartheid tendencies. As a sometimes uneasy alliance, specific tendencies predominated in some periods, and wane in others. But it might be accurate to say that a Gandhian spirit vied with, but also coalesced with, a Leninist ethos in the activities of the movement this needs exploration. The Leninist investment in the idea and practice of a vanguard translated into what Ashwin Desai, speaking of the NIC of the late 1970s and early 1980s, described as a top-heavy organisation. He says: Often ANC operatives tried to run the NIC as if it were a Leninist party. There was to be strict party discipline and decisions were to be made along the lines of democratic centralism. Congress activists in Lenasia were disciplined cadres, organised into a chain of command, with the roles of each office bearer clearly delineated. If we characterise the BC activists as sort of postmodern, then Congress activists were sort of modernists, fighting to forge unity between different cultures within the Indian community as well as between Indians and other oppressed groupings they were modernists in the sense that they dispensed with ethnic identification, although the BC people would say not to a sufficient extent. They took to their tasks with a seriousness that bespeaks a sense of mission, of being a part of a greater movement for justice, freedom and liberty. They had a grand narrative. There was no irony in their commitment. The Leninist tendency reflected itself not only in the structure of the organisation but also in its aims and objectives. Leninists are first and foremost motivated by capture of state power, and much of their activities are oriented in this direction. Right from the start, they, Congressites, began to mobilise the residents of Lenasia through campaigns that addressed their living and working conditions. One of the first of these were residents committees in the poorest sections of the town.

While they tried to secure specific gains through these campaigns, the objective directing these were always their relation to other struggles that would, it was hoped, lead to insurrection. Differences between Congress and BC Activists An obvious question, class, is not a straightforward determination of political belonging in Lenasia. While the earliest BC people were mostly lower middleclass in origin, so too were many Congress activists, although the latter also included many working class as well as upper middle class members. Perhaps this in itself qualifies as a determination, was this a battle between the lower middle class and the bourgeoisie? A more tangible difference between the two groupings revolved around the constitution of political identities. The BC activists were committed to their concept of Blackness, which elided the differences between African, Coloured and Indian and sought to meld the three groups into a united political force. This difference had already emerged in Durban when the NIC was revived in the early 1970s, and BC activists Strini Moodley and Saths Cooper objected to the idea of mobilising on the basis of racial identity. They saw the continued acceptance of Indian as an endorsement of apartheid thinking. Differences also emerged over the possibility of the Congress activists to use state-created institutions to mobilise Indians. The BC people saw the question as unthinkable, rejecting the possibility in principle, and as antithetical to the project of Blackness. The Congress activists approached the question strategically, arguing that the benefits of a mobilisation unhindered by state interference could ultimately work against the apartheid structure. But perhaps the most fraught issue was the involvement of whites in the struggle. BC by definition excludes the empirical presence of the White from the ranks of resistance cadres. The visceral presence of the White, they argued, has a debilitating effect on the Black, in a psychological and existential sense. And in a political sense the White is constituted in such a manner that he/she is destined to dilute the radicality of the Black intervention. For BC, the relation to the White would always be agonistic. Much of Congress activity also came in response to the perceived failures of the BC project. Noting the periodic dysfunctional state of the charismatic movement, Congress activists instituted discipline and organisation. Knowledge was distributed on a need to know basis, so that any one activist would be able to reveal only some details about the activities of others. Yet they became interchangeable in function, so that if one leader was detained, another could take his place. This depersonalisation is in stark contrast to the manner in which BC answers to the existential needs of an individual. According to Desai and Vahed, The old Congress-style politics of minute-taking, meeting procedures, debating and acting out of mandates,

and painstaking organisational development was not their {BC activists} priority. Rather, they sought confrontation with the apartheid regime that relied largely on spontaneity, and used mass rallies as a weapon to mobilise and conscientise. The fact that the Congress tradition achieved a kind of hegemony in Lenasia was not a forgone conclusion, but it was overdetermined. One would be guilty of an overly teleological reading if one saw as inevitable the triumph of the Congressites and that is what it was in Lenasia, and in the country. But it has been a triumph that has lost its lustre. The victory was overdetermined: by the postmodern nature of the BC intervention, which in a sense expired after by and large achieving its objectives; by its inbuilt aversion to hierarchy; by its emergence not as a statist intervention but as a desire for liberation. The contrasts between the two can be enumerated. While BC was spontaneist, histrionic, agonistic, disruptive, anti-authoritarian, and loose; the Charterists were disciplined, hierarchical, focused on specific objectives, result-oriented. Of course, these two characterisations are ideal types, and in reality many Congress activists found their political feet by identifying with Black Consciousness and being mentored by its practitioners. Both had relations to the Indian community that were complex: while the BC people more or less rejected tradition, and Indianness, the Congress people saw Indianness as an element to be mobilised, deployed by a vanguard party or cabal that decided the greater good of the community. For the BC people this is one reason why they failed to mobilise the community, for the Congressites, their Machiavellianism inclined them to see the community as a pawn in a greater game of chess. The question of manipulation on the part of both tendencies is instructive. While Congresss Leninists were unashamedly calculative vanguardists, the BC people failed to contain their efforts simply to facilitating conscientisation. The nature of their project was to create the political subject, but when that subject emerged, the question became what do I do now that I have been conscientised? And to that question BC by and large failed to deliver an answer, which led to the defection of many to Congress ranks. Congress activists were not bound by principles in the manner that BC people were, they were not averse to considering strategies that were considered taboo by the BC people, who were steeped in a quest for authenticity. Success as Failure, Failure as Success BC took as its project the birth of a new political subject, and proceeded to force this presence onto the apartheid scene. The act of giving materiality to an oppositional tendency, in Lenasia, took the form of making present the contumacious subject, through theatre, incipient mobilisation and, above all, disruption. If the System was hell-bent of preventing and suppressing this

presence, then its emergence on the radar and its persistence was itself a revolutionary activity. But in terms of organisation, the conditions of the time and the ethos of Black Consciousness itself militated against stabilisation. The resort to mass meetings and ceremonial occasions meant that continuity was problematic. Sporadic activity is not enough to sustain engagement. Thus the almost anarchic interventions of the BC activists, showing up at the meetings of governmentsponsored bodies to disrupt the proceedings. The charismatic nature of BC leadership left the organisation open to vulnerabilities. If the leader was detained, the group was left without direction. No second in command is available when charisma is detained, and the group sinks into introspection and inactivity. The demand for activists to be free of apartheid socialization meant that the group operated a guilt-inducing resocializaton, but also that the movement was unable to forge relations with groups and individuals perceived to be less radical. Thus BC activists failed to create alliances within the community they came from and failed to mobilise on a mass level. BC activists formed an insular group. Facing a community that was shocked by its apparent histrionics, the individuals of the group had to rely on each other to maintain their comportment. They formed an in-group that was prickly, sensitive, and processes of exclusion and inclusion were constitutive. There were in-jokes and private languages. The group became an end in itself. But they did forge relations with like-minded black activists from African areas such as Soweto, a by no means insignificant development that would make later, more strategic, Congress interventions possible. The failure to mobilise on a mass scale meant that the group remained small and maintained only tenuous relations with the larger community. The avant-garde positioning of the activists instilled a suspicion in their minds towards the less liberated ordinary people in the community, whose racist socialization was perceived as support for the apartheid project. Conclusions What I have tried to do here is to draw some conclusions about links between a social phenomenon that emerges on a national scene, and how it plays out in the local conditions of a small but growing Indian town. But I am also trying to draw links between social currents on the international scene and how these reflect on one particular national scene. While the use of terms such as modern and postmodern are not an exact fit, they do allow us to foreground some aspects of these currents that other types of analysis tend to bury in the background. Perhaps it is time to create new concepts that begin to allow us to think these phenomena that have for long been seen as aberrant.