Black Consciousness, Durban strikes and trade unions
A New Philosophy of Liberation
After the Rivonia convictions and the “long silence” of the mid-1960s, resistance inside South Africa looked fragmented. It was in this context that a new philosophy emerged: Black Consciousness. Its central idea was that apartheid’s deepest damage was psychological — it had made black South Africans internalise a sense of inferiority. Before political liberation could happen, mental liberation must come first.
Steve Biko was the movement’s defining intellectual. Born in 1946 in King William’s Town, he became politically active while studying medicine at the University of Natal. He was a brilliant writer and speaker who argued, in plain language, that black people had to reject the white liberal view that integration with white society was the goal, and instead build pride, solidarity and culture on their own terms.
The South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) was founded in 1969, separating black students from white-liberal-dominated student organisations. Its founding argument was that black students must organise independently to build consciousness and self-reliance.
SASO and the Black People’s Convention
SASO spread rapidly through the black universities created by the Bantu Education system — in an irony of history, the very institutions designed to restrict black education became hotbeds of political organising. In 1972, the Black People’s Convention (BPC) was founded to carry Black Consciousness beyond the campuses into community organisations, sports clubs and cultural groups.
Mamphela Ramphele was among the key figures in the BCM. Women’s groups linked to the BCM organised welfare, health clinics and community centres in townships, showing that Black Consciousness was as much about building community capacity as about political protest.
Between January and March 1973, a wave of strikes swept through Durban involving approximately 100,000 workers in docks, factories, transport and municipal services. The Durban strikes were significant for several reasons. First, they demonstrated that black workers could organise collectively even though the law gave black trade unions no recognition and made African strikes illegal. Second, they forced employers and the government to acknowledge that low wages and the pass system were economically as well as politically unsustainable.
The Durban strikes were largely peaceful. Workers walked out, demanded higher wages and, in many cases, secured modest increases. They were not led by a single organisation and were largely spontaneous — which made them harder for the government to suppress than a formal strike by a named union. They accelerated trade union organising: by the mid-1970s, embryonic independent black trade unions were emerging, which would become the basis for the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) founded in 1985.
Steve Biko’s Death in Custody
Steve Biko was banned (restricted from speaking publicly or meeting more than one person at a time) by the security police from 1973. On 18 August 1977, he was arrested at a police roadblock near Grahamstown. During interrogation at Port Elizabeth security police headquarters, he sustained severe brain injuries. He was transported 1,200 kilometres to Pretoria, naked and unconscious, in the back of a Land Rover. He died in a Pretoria prison on 12 September 1977.
An inquest court found no one criminally responsible for his death in 1978. In 1997 five former security policemen admitted to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that they had assaulted him, and in 1999 the Commission refused them amnesty. The apartheid government at the time claimed he had died from a hunger strike, a claim that was false and was exposed by the inquest evidence. Biko’s death provoked international outrage. In October 1977, the government banned all the main BCM organisations.
Steve Biko died in police custody on 12 September 1977, from brain injuries sustained during interrogation. The government banned all major Black Consciousness organisations the following month. Biko’s death became one of the most powerful symbols of apartheid brutality.
Black Consciousness filled the organisational vacuum left by the Rivonia imprisonments. It helped shape the generation of students who would lead the Soweto uprising of 1976. Its emphasis on cultural pride and psychological liberation influenced how South Africans of all generations understood their struggle. However, the BCM did not form a conventional political party and its relationship with the ANC in exile was sometimes tense — the ANC’s multiracial philosophy differed from the BCM’s emphasis on black self-organisation.