Chapter 1 - Decolonising Resistance: Political Freedom in Rick Turner and Steve Biko

Summary

Rick Turner's political philosophy and subjective location as an agent of transformation mirror Steve Biko's Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) in certain ways. Although Turner's dream of a free South Africa was cut short, one wonders – and for very good reasons – what impact his work might have had on the political unconscious of contemporary South Africa, particularly concerning emancipatory decolonisation. This chapter historicises the ideological crossroads at which Turner's and Biko's philosophies mirror and simultaneously critique each other. Like a man who saw the future, Turner anticipates Biko's prophetic critique of ‘white’ liberalism concerning the fractured decolonisation status in post-apartheid South Africa. For both Biko and Turner, decolonising resistance goes beyond the material asymmetries of culture or simply overcoming negative freedom. The residual legitimation of this claim has become more relevant in the context of emancipatory politics in contemporary South Africa. The new black bourgeoisie's entrenchment is central to this critical thesis on the weakness of the ‘liberal programme’ (see Biko 1972). As Turner (and later Biko) anticipated, the failure of the current decolonisation programme is only because the liberal programme managed to ‘induct a few blacks into the privileged class while leaving intact the real mechanism of oppression, exploitative capitalism’ (Turner 1978). The chapter draws lessons from both Turner and Biko for a new way of thinking about resistance that is neither racialised nor encumbered by asymmetries of material culture.

Drawing on Biko and Turner, I argue that the politics of resistance goes beyond the binary narration of Manichean aesthetics. In examining the structure of power and the mode of resistance in colonial South Africa, I show that resistance is not just a one-sided phenomenon within history but occurs simultaneously and is not dependent on the political positionality of the victim or the villain. In Biko's Black Consciousness philosophy, resistance is not categorised only in terms of domination, oppression or exclusion; he subverts these structures and mechanisms. Black Consciousness delegitimates the very ontology of systems of oppression. Thus, one is said to be dominated, excluded or oppressed if one possesses what Jürgen Habermas terms ‘Anerkennungswürdigkeit’ (recognition worthiness) within the system (Habermas 1979, 5).