PSCI 282
Africanist Project to Black Consciousness Fall 2020
Division II
Cross-listed PSCI 282 / GBST 282

In 1957, when it was clear the African Nation Congress was unwilling to change its multiracialist and nonracialist language in favor of Africanist pronouncements, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe left the party and became the editor of The Africanist newspaper. Two years later he formed the Pan-Africanist Congress. Similarly frustrated that the National Union of South African Students was dominated by white liberals, in 1968 Bantu Steve Biko helped form the black-only South Africa Students’ Organization and, four years later, was the key figure in founding of the Black People’s Convention, created to promote black consciousness ideas within the broader South African population. This course focuses on Sobukwe’s Africanist project and Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement, the strategies against apartheid they promoted, and the visions of a free South Africa they imagined.