Counter-narratives of achievement at South Africa's first apartheid-era black medical school, 1950s to the early 1990s

This article examines the construction and dissemination of two particular achievement narratives - one focused on high academic standards, the other on a Black Consciousness-inspired "Black pride" - that were produced by academic staff and students at the University of Natal's Medical School, South Africa's first apartheid-era black medical school in the highly racialised context of the 1950s to early 1990s. While quite different in terms of their producers and periods of origin, the article argues that both these narratives developed with a similar purpose: as counter-narratives, which intended to critique or challenge the pervasive and disparaging apartheid-era discourse that portrayed black South Africans as inferior. Indeed, both these narratives sought, in their own respective ways, to enable those producing them to reframe the dominant apartheid discourse, to offer alternatives, including more positive views about black South Africans, and to take an oppositional stance. Yet, while both developed as counter-narratives, they did so with different emphases and stances taken to challenge apartheid, highlighting the complexity of these narratives. In addition, this article examines how both these narratives could sometimes, in particular historical moments, overlap in time and even amalgamate, leading to the construction of hybridised narratives.

The Deification of Black Consciousness as an Alternative Ideology in Simphiwe Dana’s “Bantu Biko Street”

In the context of gender-based violence and xenophobia (black on black violence), the question is being asked whether black people hate themselves. Scholars have sought explanations for these social ills in socio-economic challenges that are a legacy of apartheid. These challenges have continued in the post-apartheid era. One cultural site in which poverty and violence have been reflected is the song “Bantu Biko Street” by Simphiwe Dana. The singer invokes Bantu Biko’s philosophy of Black Consciousness as a possible solution. This article closely reads this song and argues that the current government fails to deliver its material promises. The article also depicts Black Consciousness as a possible alternative ideology to foster black pride, hope and communal sharing.

American Negritude

This chapter contextualizes Malcolm X’s interventions about black feelings in the contemporary psychological literatures that framed and circulated about blackness to understand how new black psychology informed Malcolm’s emotional and rhetorical repertoire. Then, in excavating Malcolm’s performances of black rage as an easily identifiable feeling and an intended goal of his rhetorical corpus, Corrigan argues that Malcolm’s psychological strategy articulated what she calls “American Negritude.” Marrying black psychology to the work of African and Caribbean intellectuals theorizing postcolonial black subjectivity, Malcolm’s rhetorical skills hinged on his ability to resituate black political and social consciousness around black pride and disidentification from whites. Malcolm’s American Negritude, particularly as it embraced rage, was at odds with the affective orientation and the racial liberalism of the integrationists and created both tension and opportunity for a global blackness. Still, while Malcolm reconceptualized feeling and being black, his enactment of black rage was often confused with hatred, which fueled white opposition to Malcolm and the NOI and fed white fragility in the early 1960s. Malcolm’s critique of black loyalty to white civil religion hinged on his relentless exposure of faulty black identifications, which he saw as a form of modern slavery.