5 - ‘Sharpening the Spear’

Summary

Chapter 5 delves into the presence of Black Consciousness as a powerful current of thought and praxis inside Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK). The period from 1977 to 1981 is generally agreed upon by scholars and activists as one in which MK was able to assert itself as the leading South African liberation movement. It was also clearly recognized that Soweto generation recruits who came to MK during the uprising were fundamental to this transformation. However, the details on how this generation brought its Black Consciousness politics into the armed wing of the ANC have been underemphasized. The Soweto generation recruits who dominated the rank-and-file and mid-level commanders in the immediate years after 1976 carried a politics of Black Consciousness into MK which temporarily enabled it to become a more radical organization. Building on Stephen Davis’s conception of Novo Catengue and other camps in Angola as spaces of both repression and the positive foundation of the newly re-forged MK, this chapter will attempt to interrogate the role Black Consciousness played within this space.